Beyond the Field Book Project

Wednesday, 11 May 2016

Ever wonder how #FWTrueLove and #FossilFossick came to be? On May 5, Meghan Ferriter, Transcription Center Coordinator, and Lesley Parilla, Field Book Project Cataloging Coordinator, held a hangout with Transcription Center volunteers to talk about how these campaigns came about, their evolution, and how volunteer interactions influence future campaigns. There might even be a some information about another campaign in the works!

In February 2015, Field Book Project worked with Department of Paleobiology (NMNH), Smithsonian Institution Archives, Biodiversity Heritage Library, and Transcription Center to create a social media campaign around the materials of F. W. True. The goal was to inspire volunteers to transcribe selected materials in a two week period of time. The campaign was such a success with volunteers that Biodiversity Heritage Library worked with Smithsonian departments to coordinate #FossilFossick in October 2015 around paleobiology collections.

Thursday, 19 March 2015

Hello! My name is Vicky Steeves, and I’m the National Digital Stewardship Resident at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. My project at the AMNH is to survey the scientific curators about how they manage, store, and preserve their digital research and collections data, and provide recommendations to the AMNH on those three facets. This primarily consists of conducting interviews within the science divisions at the Museum so that I can form a baseline metric to compare the Museum’s needs with existing standards and best practices for scientific data management, storage, and preservation.

While the scope of my project is in the digital realm, I am constantly shown the value of field books and older scientific texts through conversations with science staff. All the scientists at the AMNH are as passionate about our historic collections of field notebooks as they are about their own field notes. The curatorial staff recognizes that these notebooks represent important data points not only in the field, as research data, but also in terms of the history of science--these are things that cannot be lost to time or negligence. The work done is too important. During my interviews, many scientists have expressed to me that the most important data from their work are actually their field notes--the majority of which are still done with good old fashioned pencil and paper. A subset of these folks will digitize their field notes as time allows, and an even fewer number of curators record their field notes digitally, though without exception, everyone has expressed a desire to digitize and preserve their notebooks.

One of my most memorable experiences was a tour of the archives in the Mammalogy department in the division of Vertebrate Zoology. I was there interviewing a curator who is exceptionally passionate about the historical science collection, and was surprised I had never been to see these particular archives. He showed me some of the old catalogues of specimens, but I could see his eyes light up as we approached the incredibly massive collection of field books held under lock and key in a “cage.”

AMNH Mammalogy Division Archives, photo courtesy of Vicky Steeves and the American Museum of Natural History

As I flipped through some of the newer, less vulnerable books he told me he often comes into this section of the archives to examine old accounts of expeditions, which tend to include species descriptions, and descriptions of environments that have changed drastically in the intervening years. He told me sometimes he visited these books as frequently as once a day because the information within these hundred year old volumes is so helpful to his research.

This was, to me, an awe-inspiring representation about the beauty of natural sciences. In spite of the advances in scientific methodologies and tools, there are vast quantities of information that have yet to be mined from these unpublished notebooks--valuable information about the world that was which helps scientists make strides in explaining the world as it is and what it might become. Its importance cannot be overstated.

Henry Fairfield Osborn's notes about Hell Creek formation, Montana, 1908, photo courtesy of Vicky Steeves and the American Museum of Natural History

Take this image from Henry Fairfield Osborn’s field book from his vertebrate paleontology expedition from 1906-1908 as an example. We can see from the image above that he is documenting the sediment layers of this geological formation. Paleontologists often take cues from the chemical makeup of rock and earth layers to look at major changes in the Earth’s environment, which can help glean information about what life was like at that point in our planet’s history.

Images from field books act as “pictures in time,” allowing present-day scientists to work with data in physical locations which have since been altered by weather or other external factors. Close to a hundred years later, these resources are still used in scholarly discourse: This image was used in our AMNH Paleontology Division Chair and Curator-in-Charge Mark Norell’s Discovering Dinosaurs: Evolution, Extinction, and the Lessons of Prehistory, published in 2000. This is the true beauty of what we do as science librarians--keep the record of scientific discourse accessible through time.

The AMNH Research Library has taken steps to ensure these field books, both digital and analog, are being taken care of for future use. The Library was recently awarded a grant from the Leon Levy Foundation to catalogue field books across the Museum, the first step towards their digitization. My own project is similarly involved in “cataloguing” what informational assets the Museum has, however it extends beyond field and lab books to all digital data in Science.

Field book from an African expedition, AMNH Mammalogy Archives, photo courtesy of Vicky Steeves and the American Museum of Natural History

The final deliverable of my project will be a set of recommendations to the Museum for storage, management, and preservation of digital assets. Undoubtedly, I will include a section specific to preserving digital field notes and books, as it is a huge concern for curators and indeed, the scientific community at large. My most preliminary recommendations in regard to field books are these: first catalogue them, even if only minimally; digitize any that are not already digitized; and stay ahead of the curve and update your file formats to avoid obsolescence.

Taking care of analog materials is a very established discipline at this point--while the tools are being continually refined, there is an abundance of information available to would-be conservators and archivists about taking care of their physical letters, journals, what have you. The next frontier of stewardship lies entirely in the digital realm--so to all the science librarians out there, I would say to get involved with the digital life of your user group and begin discussions about digital preservation of their field and lab books--because their value NEVER depreciates.

Horace Waller was an English missionary and anti-slavery activist in the 19th century. In 1859 Waller joined the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA). As Lay Superintendent to the UMCA, Waller befriended the famous missionary Dr. David Livingstone and botanist John Kirk who were in Africa as part of the British government-funded Zambezi Expedition. Livingstone, as head of that expedition, and Kirk, as naturalist, together navigated the Zambezi River area between 1858 and 1863. The purpose of the expedition was to chart the geography and catalogue the natural resources of the area. On 19 March 1863 Kirk wrote in his diary “Mr Waller is making a fine collection of insects, chiefly of the Lepidoptera”. Waller assembled this field book of the Butterflies collected in the Shire Valley East Africa from his time there.

Waller was an amateur naturalist, but a clearly practiced one, who shared his collection with experienced naturalists such as Roland Trimen who later thanked Waller for showing him specimens from the Shire valley.

The butterfly specimens in Waller’s field book were prepared by an infrequently employed technique termed lepidochromy in the 19thcentury. Lepidochromy involved using humidified, relaxed wings and an adhesive such as gum Arabic. By pressing the wings between two prepared papers the dorsal and ventral sides could be separated from each other and the scales, or “feathers”, would remain. Once mounted, the bodies of the insects were drawn in. This type of transfer illustration is classified as a nature print.

Ninety years before Waller ventured into Africa, George Edwards published a group of essays in 1770 that included “A Receipt For taking the Figures of Butterflies on Thin Gummed Paper” This, or a slight derivation of it, was the method most likely employed by Waller to mount his “Flys”. By 1889, refinements in the process of lepidochromy were outlined completely in Scientific American, Supplement. It was a simple but onerous process where in the wings were transferred twice so that the brighter outer layer of scales would be right side up when mounted.

Printed volumes with nature prints were also published, but they were few. Printed editions were very labor-intensive and required hundreds and sometimes thousands of specimens. An immodest example is Sherman F. Denton’s two volume set of Moths and butterflies of the United States east of the Rocky Mountains (Boston, 1900) where more than 50,000 butterflies and moths were immortalized.

The scholarship on this humble field book continues. Dr. David Clough of the Namizimu Institute in Mangochi Malawi recently inquired about the volume for exhibition after seeing the blog post, “The Art in Field Books” by Lesley Parilla. Dr. Clough then shared Waller’s butterflies with his colleague Dr. Lawrence Dritsas, a historian of science at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. When the field book was acquired into the collection of Judge Russell E. Train in the late 20th century the authorship had been misattributed to Sir John Kirk. Dr. Dritsas has since properly identified the work’s creator as Horace Waller. Waller’s monogram is evident on the cover just below the title. From a book historian’s point of view, now the only remaining question is at what point was the field book’s authorship confused.

Lepidopterists both at the Smithsonian and in Africa have also been consulted about the specimens and a complete and accurate list of the butterfly types have been identified by Dr. Clough and Smithsonian lepidopterists Dr. Robert Robbins and Mr. Brian Harris.

With thanks to Drs. Dritsas, Clough, Robbins, as well as Brian Harris and Lesley Parilla.

Tuesday, 09 December 2014

Earlier this year, the Smithsonian Women's Committee awarded a one-year grant to Smithsonian Libraries (SIL) to build online exhibitions to showcase the scientific and historical contributions of Women and Latino naturalists and illustrators. The project, entitled Notable Women and Latinos in Natural History, draws from content in BHL and uses the Biodiversity Library Exhibition (BLE) platform developed by BHL Europe.

Field books from all five women were cataloged as part of the Field Book Project. Field books of Calderon and Chase were recently made available on Biodiveristy Heritage Library (BHL) through work with Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA). We encourage you to take a look at their publications and field books, and experience their work firsthand, available through resources on Smithsonian's Collections Search Center, BHL, and SIA.

Tuesday, 07 October 2014

Many of our digitized field books are sent to the Smithsonian Transcription Center to help make the text more accessible to a wider audience. We’ve been thrilled with the response, and the excitement and dedication of Smithsonian’s Transcription Center volunpeers! Transcribers do more than convert handwritten text to machine-readable, searchable text. In fact, one of the most satisfying alternate aspects of their work has been the way in which they have increased communication about the field book materials within and between Smithsonian Staff and other volunpeers. The Transcription Center is not only making the field book content increasingly searchable, but also opening fascinating dialogues with new audiences!

We’d like to share just a few examples from the conversations we’ve been following through the transcription and review of William Healey Dall’s Diary 1865-1867 during his work in Alaska. Curious to have a look yourself? Check out the field book PDF now available through at: https://transcription.si.edu/project/6828

Tuesday, 29 April 2014

The Field Book Project catalogs a wide range of field book formats. In fact, you can find more than 30 different types of field book contents in the Field Book Registry catalog. Maps are one of my favorite types. Over the years we’ve talked a lot about the photographs, drawings, and text we’ve found in collections, but the maps seemed to be mentioned less often. So it seemed appropriate to pull together some examples of the variety we’ve cataloged. There are more than 500 field book catalog records that include maps available to search on Smithsonian Collection Search Center. Below is just a small cross-section of those.

They vary from rough sketches in journals to commercially printed editions that are hand colored and annotated. They can be visually arresting as well as impart important information recorded by collectors. Unfortunately due to the range of sizes and physical condition, many of the maps present serious conservation and digitization challenges. Below is an example of the type of work conservators face in order to treat the maps. We don’t often get the chance to share them online. Many of the maps cataloged as part of field book collections must be seen in person.

Maps present another challenge. Just as field books are sometimes separated from the specimens they describe, maps are sometimes separated from the field notes they document. This may occur because they represent a storage challenge for a department, or they are no longer seen as relevant to current research. As we’ve cataloged in the departments and divisions of NMNH, we’ve continually run into a volunteer run project from the Botany Department that is taking on this challenge. With it being National Volunteer Appreciation Month, we thought it a great chance to highlight their work. Now that many of the NMNH field books are cataloged, we have been able to reconnect to some of the maps that Jim Harle and his fellow volunteers have located during their efforts. We encourage you to search for some of the following names on their website at:

Tuesday, 15 April 2014

While it’s true that we think of the Transcription Center as a site of discovery, we don’t always anticipate which specific connections will be uncovered in the process of transcription.

Recently, I had the opportunity to learn about the delight of discovery directly from one of our volunteers. Siobhan Leachman and I talked via e-mail about her experiences transcribing from New Zealand – and what she had learned about Field Book Project researchers and expeditions. I asked Siobhan to share more about how she got hooked on transcribing, after she noted that she was a bit tentative at first.

SL: The project that really got me addicted was Vernon Bailey's field notes. I started on that not long after it was uploaded. The main reason I enjoyed that project so much was Vernon’s spare but descriptive writing style. He was writing about wolves, which to me are a lot more interesting than insects or plants, and was also describing the conditions he had to put up with on his trip as well as the people he came in contact with. It made his journal come alive. I worked solidly on his journal over one weekend and transcribed most of it in the space of three days with the help of some other enthusiastic volunteers. I was completely hooked and kept working on it as I wanted to know what happened next. For me it was like reading a movie script, I had images of “Dances with Wolves” going through my head, and there was always something interesting happening just on the next page.

SL: Once I started doing more transcribing more names started to become familiar. Vernon Bailey mentioned C. Hart Merriam, who I’ve since learned is Florence Bailey’s brother. Florence of course being Vernon’s wife. Then there are Coville’s field notes, that also mention a person called Bailey, who I’m assuming will either be Florence or more likely Vernon. After a while I realised that these groups of people working in the same area, at the same time, and are of course colleagues. They mention each other in their diaries and journals. It makes it a more interesting experience for me if I know the background of the people I’m working on.

We also have Leonhard Stejneger’s field notes from an expedition with C. Hart Merriam in the Transcription Center! Right alongside our volunteers, we are learning about the social histories and political relationships outlined in the transcriptions. As the Field Book Project digitizes field notes for easier access to this wealth of scientific activity, it also gives us insight into daily lives in different regions of the world. Siobhan emphasized that the details drew deeper connections into these projects.

SL: I’ve enjoyed [Vernon Bailey and Florence Bailey] field journals. They are such descriptive writers who go to the trouble of describing their surroundings and in particular other people. Florence describes tuberculosis patients as well as their family members on a train. She eaves drops constantly on conversations and is very good at giving you a real image of what it was like. You could almost be sitting next to her on the train. …[Also in her] description of San Francisco in 1907. I found it fascinating that she didn’t mention the word earthquake at all, but went into great detail about the devastation of the fires on the city.

We love the idea of taking a train ride with some of the Field Book Project scientists – a viewpoint you’ll get if you help review Florence’s notes in the Transcription Center. You might take on Siobhan’s thoughtful advice on transcribing from the “volunpeer” perspective.

SL: My advice for any new volunteer transcriber is find a project you love. If you are anything like me, you’ll feel like you are making wonderful new friends, even though the people whose work you are transcribing have died long before you were born. I would have loved to have invited Vernon and Florence to dinner. And I know they would have loved New Zealand. Particularly Florence as we’ve got so many native birds she’d never have seen. She would have been fascinated.

Indeed, the Baileys would surely be fascinated by New Zealand natural life. Many thanks to Siobhan for sharing her story. We are grateful to our dedicated volunteers and always welcome new members to our community. Have you transcribed in the Transcription Center? What have you discovered? Get in touch with us via e-mail or on Twitter and share your story.

We’re excited to report that, once a project is 100% complete, you’ll be able to download it as a PDF from the project page. One of my favorite parts of cataloging is the range of information I’ve been able to read in these primary resources. Now volunteers can do the same, a task made easier by their collaboration in transcribing and reviewing.

If you haven’t visited the Transcription Center, we encourage you to take a look. Try transcribing something or read a completed project to learn more about science in that field. Your transcription efforts not only make the materials easier to read, but also make them more accessible to future researchers.

Lastly…to the volunteers who’ve already been working on these materials, thanks for all your hard work!

Friday, 17 January 2014

This is the second of a joint blog series by the Field Book Project (FBP) and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), showcasing examples of digital connections between collectors, field book catalog records, and the resulting publications of collecting events.

The first post in this series about organizations discussed the nascence of the US Biological Survey. It seems appropriate to follow with the story of the US Bureau of Fisheries. “Why?” you might ask. Simple! These two organizations later merged and formed the US Fish and Wildlife Service! The Bureau was primarily shaped while it was still known as the US Commission of Fisheries. It would become the Bureau in 1903. To understand its development, one must look at the years prior to 1903.

In the 1870’s the US saw a noticeable decline in the Southern New England fisheries. The US knew little about the fishing grounds off its own coasts. Spencer F. Baird, a respected naturalist and a Smithsonian secretary, had a background in ichthyology and was approached by Congress about these issues. He recognized an important opportunity to promote the scientific study of the US’s marine natural resources in an effort to help the US economically. In 1871, he convinced Congress to establish the Commission on Fish and Fisheries. He served as the first commissioner.

In the Commission’s early years, completing field work was a challenge, since it had no vessels and little funding of its own. Staffing and research (collecting and surveying) was completed in conjunction with the Smithsonian. This is one of the reasons Smithsonian Institution Archives has so many of the organization’s early records. The Commission often had to utilize ships supplied by the Revenue Service and US Navy. It was not until the 1880’s that they were able to procure their own research vessels.

When the Commission finally obtained the funds to acquire their own, they didn’t just go with any ship. They hired builders to design and construct some of the first ships dedicated solely for marine research. Each of these vessels enabled the Bureau to substantially increase their efficiency and research output. Additionally these vessels were used in the field for decades and were pivotal in assuring the quality and quantity of research data the Commission/Bureau could provide. Unlike research completed aboard another agency’s vessel, these were designed for research, and research staff didn’t have to worry about competing missions while at sea. Even the ship’s logbooks demonstrate this vividly. When scientists were aboard another agency’s vessels, their specimen collecting data was usually recorded in a journal separate from the logbook. US Fisheries vessels’ purpose was to enable the research, so the collected information was part of the ship’s logbook contents.

These ships were important tools for the numerous collectors the Commission sent into the field. Unlike Vernon Bailey who both collected and published widely over the years, several of the Commission’s collectors like William W. Welsh, focused on the field work and left the publishing to others. Ship’s logbooks, in their brevity often left little room for recording who did the research/work. Luckily, Commission and Bureau field documentation also included personal field books which document another important part of the Commission’s field work--interviewing local inhabitants for their knowledge of local fishing conditions and good fishing grounds. The field books (such as SIA RU007187) include surprisingly detailed interviews with locals about their lives, work, and personal knowledge of the habitat. Frequently the Commission’s publications are the synopsis of field work. These publications are often most easily located through the name of the vessel on which the staff worked, like the Fish Hawk (1880), Albatross (1883), and Grampus (1885).

We encourage you to take a look at the logbooks from these ships, now available in digital format through the Smithsonian, and compare to their resulting publications available through BHL. Learn more about the interviews completed by Commission staff that augmented knowledge gained by collecting.

Friday, 13 December 2013

This is the first of a joint blog series by the Field Book Project (FBP) and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), showcasing examples of digital connections between collectors, field book catalog records, and the resulting publications of collecting events.

Over the summer the Field Book Project and Biodiversity Heritage Library examined some of the fascinating stories and natural history documentation that resulted from major expeditions. In the past, expeditions were the best way to expediently collect in many regions of the world. Expeditions still occur today, but they were far more common before the advent of major changes in transportation. Expeditions tend to generate great stories; the mix of personalities, challenges, and exotic locations seem to make it inevitable. For much of the nineteenth century, expeditions were often organized as needed; they could be heavily influenced by the temperaments of the people leading them. Strong personalities among the leaders sometimes led to serious conflicts (curious to learn more? Check out the US Geological Survey’s (USGS) biography on John Wesley Powell, the Survey’s second director, and its discussion of the Powell, Hayden, King, and Wheeler Surveys). These conflicts and the US government’s growing need for more consistent information about its natural resources eventually led to fundamental changes in the way collecting was completed. Eventually the US federal government established organizations like the US Bureau of Fisheries, US Geological Survey, US Biological Survey whose primary purpose was to routinely collect, document, and eventually oversee some of the nation’s natural resources.

These organizations and their first collectors often involve great stories, but also provide wonderful examples of the types of field work documented. Additionally, their efforts were for the United States’s benefit, and the resulting reports and publications are now available through resources like the Biodiversity Heritage Library. This new blog series is a chance to highlight the different types of collectors that formed these organizations.

United States Biological Survey (USBS)

The first story will highlight the beginnings of the US Biological Survey (USBS), originally formed by C. Hart Merriam under the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). The story forms around two individuals of note—C. Hart Merriam (first chief of USBS) and Vernon Bailey (USBS’s first major specimen collector and naturalist). These individuals each had unique ways of coming to their field of study, method of work, and differing output, but each was an important contributor to their discipline. Their catalog records and publications are also available through FBP and BHL (see content links below).

C. Hart Merriam was a biologist, whose work at the end of the 19th century was instrumental in the emerging field of ecology. His field work and affiliation with the USDA led to his "life zones" concept. In 1885 he was chosen to head the Section of Economic Ornithology in the USDA. His vision for the section eventually shifted its focus from only birds to include mammals. By 1896 it became the USBS, later merging with other federal entities to form the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

In 1883, C. Hart Merriam began corresponding with a young man in Minnesota with an interest in collecting, named Vernon Bailey. This relationship developed over the decades, and proved an important influence on the shaping and growth of the USBS. Merriam had a strong educational background in science and was well established in the USDA. But for the USBS to develop, he needed people in the field. Bailey did not have a formal education in the sciences, but showed a natural aptitude for collecting that Merriam mentored through their correspondence. In 1885, Bailey began sending collections to Merriam, and in 1887, Merriam hired Bailey as the first field agent for Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy (what would become USBS). Bailey went on to collect for over 50 years, and became the first and only chief field naturalist of the USBS in 1890, a position he held until his death in 1933.

Their relationship proved important on a personal level as well. During one of Bailey’s visits to Washington, DC, he stayed at Merriam’s home. This provided a chance to meet Merriam’s sister, Florence Merriam Bailey, who was a distinguished naturalist in her own right. Vernon and Florence would marry in 1899. Throughout their marriage they completed field work together and co-wrote natural sciences publications.

Perhaps the best way to see how these individuals’ styles of work and interests differed, is to examine their field books and publications.

Tuesday, 20 August 2013

Over the last two and a half years the Field Book Project has worked in various ways to make field book content more searchable and accessible to researchers. We’ve identified, cataloged, and completed needed conservation on thousands of field books. With the support of the Smithsonian Women’s Committee and Smithsonian Institution Archives, we’ve even begun page level digitization. Now we’re excited to be contributing materials to the Smithsonian’s Transcription Center, currently in beta testing.

As our Handwriting Contest in January demonstrated, field books are often hand written, meaning they are frequently not good candidates for OCR (Optical Character Recognition). We’re particularly excited to be part of this developing site because transcription will enable field book text to be fully word searchable.

We’d like to invite you to take a look at the new site. Check out the field books and other great Smithsonian materials that are available for transcription. Try your hand at interpreting their hand. Your efforts can help scholars discover the rich content buried in the pages.

If you’re not sure where to start, watch our twitter feed. Over the next few months we’ll be tweeting which new field books are being made available to transcribe.

To encourage inexperienced editors and show them how they can contribute to Wikipedia

To improve a selection of Wikipedia articles related to scientists and expeditions

To make Smithsonian-held materials more openly linked

To test a new transcribing tool to make our field books more findable and useful

To increase awareness of the research resources freely available through libraries, archives, and museums

Attendees of the Field Notes Edit-a-Thon 2013, by Wikipedia user Slowking4

We’re thrilled to say that the 18 participants who joined us made fantastic progress on each of these goals. Those new to Wikipedia editing (myself included!) were made to feel welcome and received lots of great pointers on creating and editing articles. Altogether, four new pages were created and seven articles were updated with additional content and links. We’ve written before about the benefits of providing links between affiliated field book creators so that researchers can more easily find materials produced as a result of collaborations, affiliations, or participation on expeditions. So it should come as no surprise that we are thrilled that so many hyperlinks were added as part of the day’s editing activities. Several participants also tried out the Smithsonian’s new beta transcription site and provided valuable feedback. You can read more about the day’s events, including the wonderful tour of the Joseph F. Cullman 3rd Library of Natural History, on the Smithsonian Institution Archives’ blog: http://siarchives.si.edu/blog/field-notes-wikipedia-edit-thon.

You can help!

Although the event itself is over, you can actually still help us improve the Wikipedia articles on the Explorers & Expeditions to-do list and in making Smithsonian-held field books more openly linked. To get started, just visit the to-do list page and pick a topic of interest to you. Be sure to check out the possible reference resources listed for each topic and feel free to use and cite any new references that you find!

New to Wikipedia editing or looking for more guidance? Check out Meghan Ferriter’s (event co-organizer and SIA research associate) Tips & Tricks for creating Wikipedia articles.

Thursday, 28 February 2013

“The
Journal, written in pen at the end of every day, would be considerably
fuller and neater, her notes organized, sorted out, edited, expanded,
with detailed observations of behavior recorded at the back, on separate
pages for each individual species. For the Journal, and for Species
Accounts, she created a narrative, free of sentiment or much personal
reflection—a scientific document, not a diary, but with the skeleton of
facts dressed in the clothes of complete sentences, so as to be readable
by any stranger looking over her shoulder. All manner of facts might
prove important to a student of the future, this was Grinnell's belief.
Nothing in nature should be assumed insignificant.”

Much
has been written about Joseph Grinnell’s methodical standard for taking
notes, better known as the Grinnell method, but the fictional short
story written by Molly Gloss is probably my favorite. It’s titled, The Grinnell Method.
I can’t resist the romantic interpretation of Grinnell’s perfected
method. I especially love how the Grinnell method is the constant, the
order behind this protagonist’s wandering life.

The
Grinnell Method is a comprehensive approach to recording observations
and activity in the field and is recognized internationally as a
standard in field note taking. Field notes consist of the Journal,
Species Accounts, and the Catalogue. Maps, drawings and photos of
localities and specimens are expected. Grinnell had standardized the
method by 1908, when he was established as the first director of the
Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California Berkeley
(MVZ). His earlier field notebooks contain similar header information as
outlined by the method but the standard sized paper and headers aren't
consistent until 1908. The museum still follows the method today,
including the paper size.

From
an archives perspective, the uniformity of the data makes it easier to
catalog geographic locations and more importantly, the historic field
notes have been the foundation for resurveys conducted by the MVZ. You
can learn more about the Grinnell Method on the MVZ website.

The
majority of the MVZ archival collections consist of field notes. As I'm
sure the Field Book Project can attest to, working with field notes is both
fascinating and complex. There is a wealth of data stored in and related to
the pages bound (or unbound) in the notebooks. One focus of the MVZ’s
three-year Hidden Collections grant from
the Council for Library and Information Resources is to try to link
our existing resources to our archival finding aids in a dynamic and new
way.

The MVZ has a number of field notes scanned as part of an earlier grant. They are located on the MVZ Field Notebook site. Additionally, the MVZ utilizes Arctos,
a multi-institutional specimen database, to manage its specimen
collections in addition to other data related to collecting events.
Because our data are available online, I can link them through various
finding aid notes. Primarily I utilize the Related Archival Materials
note and the Existence of Copies note. The Charles H. Richardson finding aid is an example of how a finding aid can incorporate references to specimen data and digitized material.

Screenshot of how finding aid notes are used to link materials.

We
are still perfecting our own methods for making these connections.
We’re also looking at ways in which Arctos can link back to the finding
aid for a two-way match. This is just the start of the grant and I hope
that future developments include more innovative ways of bringing all of
the data together.

Readers can keep up with the MVZ Hidden Collections Project by visiting the MVZ Archives blog.

By Lesley Parilla, Field Book Project,
with contributions from Bianca Crowley, BHL Collections Coordinator

The Field Book Project (FBP) and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) are pleased to bring you a joint blog series showcasing some of the best examples of digital connections between museum specimens, field book catalog records, and the resulting publications for three notable expeditions. This four part series will continue over the coming months. Ever wonder what it takes to understand the full story of historical expedition science? Read on!

It’s safe to say, everyone has an idea of what an expedition is; I hope all will agree when I say they are fascinating. Expeditions can be a thrilling story of exploration, national pride, thrill-seeking, and personal drama. They have been organized for a myriad of political or personal reasons; whatever these may have been, expeditions frequently yield natural history observations and specimens. Expeditions are also a wonderful source of information about biodiversity. Since expedition participants usually come from multiple institutions and disciplines, more collecting is often possible. This can result in a specimen collection of greater breadth and variety than a typical collecting event. With these characteristics, an expedition can prove a fascinating story and an important source of scientific documentation.

So I’ve been thinking it would be interesting to look at the Field Book Project’s expedition content. FBP was inspired by the challenges a researcher experienced tracking down specimens and field books from an expedition. Those experiences helped shape the cataloging structure FBP developed. We create catalog records for field books, their collections, and their creators (persons, organizations, and expeditions). Since we started, we have cataloged field books from 103 expeditions, some involving well-known individuals or documenting the first time an area was thoroughly studied.

On December 19th, FBP catalog records were made available through the Smithsonian’s Collection Search Center. This has created what I like to think of as the trifecta. What constitutes the trifecta? There are three major parts to natural history documentation that have proven important to researchers with whom we’ve worked: (1) the specimens, (2) the field books created when specimens were collected, and (3) the publications that resulted from their study. The Smithsonian Institution maintains online databases for many of their specimens. As BHL blog readers know, Smithsonian Libraries has also contributed to the Biodiversity Heritage Library to provide digitized versions of the publications for free access online. The FBP now offers online descriptions of the individual primary documents. The trifecta is growing for a number of Smithsonian sponsored expeditions and collecting events. A researcher now has a better chance of locating a specimen, its related field book, and a publication that cites it.

As a Field Book Project cataloger, I am thrilled to see the last element of the trifecta, our records, now available. While cataloging, we often verify information like location names by searching for digitized publications the creator may have written based on the field books. I find it fascinating to see how a publication can be informed by a primary document and vice versa. A researcher may be able to determine what a creator saw as significant about the collecting through the publication, and see the day-to-day work that the creator used to come to that conclusion in the field book.

What is so challenging about researching specimens and documentation from a historical expedition? When an expedition ends, it can eventually fall from the public consciousness. The specimens and documentation might then be divided. At the very least, specimens go to each institution whose staff collected it. Specimens and documentation may be separated again by type and sent to different departments within an institution (e.g. mammal specimens go to mammalogy, bird specimens to ornithology). The fact that they were collected during the same expedition may not be recorded with each handoff. Each separation makes it harder to guarantee that the expedition connection is still evident.

Publications resulting from expeditions also run a high risk of losing an explicit expedition connection. Book catalog records do not always indicate that a publication documents a certain expedition. A researcher looking for resulting publications might have to search for participants as authors, looking for a period of time after the expedition was completed, then read the publication itself to verify the content is relevant.

Some of these issues, like discovery of expedition related publications, may seem pretty straightforward, but this type of search assumes that the researcher knows who took part in the expedition.

How expeditions are documented

Expedition documentation varies widely. In recent years, some universities and museums have used the general appeal of expeditions to highlight some of their own collections online. These can be wonderfully informative websites, but usually only cover a few expeditions of significance to the home institution.

The Smithsonian Institution, as part of its initiative to be a provider of public history, has a detailed list of Smithsonian related expeditions available as an online guide that covers 1878 – 1917, compiled from Smithsonian Annual Reports. The Institution’s annual reports have a long tradition of discussing any major fieldwork. Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA) also maintains more than 150 individual expedition records. These records are at varied levels of completeness, since Annual Reports sometimes only mention the name of a collecting effort if it was small.

Over the last two years, FBP has documented 103 expeditions relating to field notes. Several were not in the extensive list already kept by SIA, but deeply buried in personal or departmental papers. These can be rich resources, but a researcher would usually not know the information was there without reading the materials, despite the detailed finding aids SIA generates every year.

Researching an expedition is like untangling a very large knot. FBP, BHL, and museum divisions work to increase online documentation so researchers can find the right string to pull. This is by no means a finished process; many of us know what a gnarly tangle the search through materials can become. The digitization of the specimen, field book, and publication trifecta can only serve to ease the burden of this twisted ravel of biology, personal history and published record, helping us and our researchers to find the connections.

Friday, 07 December 2012

Scotty Thybony at Canyon Diablo, Arizona.Photograph by Robert Schneck.

Taking
notes has become second nature for me.
After scratching down a few observations in the field, I return and work
them into narrative notes. They can end
up being anything from a straight-forward record of events to stray impressions
tied together into a storyline.

A few of the notebooks used by the author in the field. Photograph by Scott Thybony.

On recent
trips to the Grand Canyon, these fieldnotes have included an investigation of
paint smears on a cliff wall where the artist Louis Akin cleaned his palette
more than 100-years ago. They’ve
described the dramatic unfolding of the last monsoon storm of the summer and
traced the story of an old inscription carved on a rock face by the orphaned
son of an Arctic explorer who died of starvation on a disastrous expedition.

So field
notations in all their variety interest me – the journals of explorers, the
notebooks of artists, and the diaries of scientists. At times I’ve found myself deep in the back
rooms of the Smithsonian Institution among file cabinets and specimen drawers,
deciphering the faded pen and ink records they contain. The field notebooks have a rawness to them I
like, a spontaneity not found in monographs and memoirs. One day I sat in the research library reading
the diary of Charles Walcott, a geologist who spent three cold months in 1882
and 1883 studying rock formations below the rim of Grand Canyon. I was searching for descriptions of the
landscape between Nankoweap and Vishnu Temple written when he was seeing it for
the first time, unfiltered.

What I
didn’t expect when I opened his diary was to encounter the human side of the
geologist. Walcott, who would go on to
become director of the U.S. Geological Survey and head of the Smithsonian, was
32-years old and had lost his wife six years before. As he rode the train west, he recorded in his
diary a few routine observations and the normal chance encounters with other
passengers. And then the tone of his
writing changed. The scientist made a
hurried entry beginning with the words, “Met a nonsensical girl . . .”. It ended with a bold flourish of the pen, the
only flourish in the entire diary. And
tucked between the pages I found a lock of fine blonde hair. Sensible geologist encounters nonsensical
girl, and balance is restored to the world.

Once in
the field, Walcott wrote about the geology, naturally, and the winter storms
sweeping in, bringing snow and sleet. He
mentioned the packers, who hauled in supplies and carried out specimens, and
trails so difficult they lost a mule off the edge of one. He noted his frostbitten feet and water
pockets freezing solid at night, forcing the men to place chunks of ice around
the campfire to melt for the animals.
Camped at the river he wrote about the crashing rapids sounding like
Niagara Falls.

I took
notes on his notes from the Grand Canyon, but that’s not what stayed with me
when I left the archives. Walking down
the street, I kept thinking about the wild flourish of the pen – and left
between the pages of the diary, a single lock of hair, long forgotten.

A former river guide and archeologist, Scott Thybony
writes books and articles for major publications. His interviews have ranged from astronauts to
medicine men, while his travels through North America have resulted in
award-winning magazines articles.

Wednesday, 05 December 2012

As part of our Beyond the Field Book Project section of this blog, we have been conducting a series of interviews to learn more about the value of field books for research and some of the challenges in trying to access them. This week, I’m very pleased to share a recent interview with David Bloom (and his co-conspirators) on a very exciting, multi-institutional project that successfully addresses some of those common challenges. David Bloom is the VertNet Coordinator and one-fifth of the Henderson Field Notes Project. Read on for an inspiring (and fun!) look at what this group was able to achieve in the space of one year.

Here at the Field Book Project, we’ve been reading the So You Think You Can Digitize blog, and it has been exciting to follow the work done on the Henderson Field Notes Project. For those readers who may be hearing of it for the first time, how would you describe the Henderson Field Notes Project?

Junius Henderson in 1904 at Arapaho Glacier. Image in the public domain. Retrieved December 2012 from Wikimedia Commons.

The Henderson Field Notes Project is an exploration of what is possible once a large volume of natural history-oriented material is digitized. In our case, this happens to be a set of fourteen volumes of field notes written between 1905 and 1919 by Junius Henderson, founder and first curator of the University of Colorado’s Museum of Natural History (CU Museum). Prior to the project we were exploring various questions about how, what, and why to digitize, but we realized that to answer these questions we needed some understanding of what we might want to do with a treasure trove of digitized data once we had it.

3. To use some of the automated data extraction tools we’ve discovered to do things such as linking names of taxa, places, people, and dates to other sources of biodiversity knowledge;

4. To produce at least one “Nifty Thing” as a result of this project — like a map on Google Earth showing Henderson’s travels or a fancy coffee mug adorned by a great picture of Henderson in the field;

5. To spend no more than five hours per person on this experiment — because we like the idea of discovering what substantial products can be produced on a budget of no money and close-to-no time.

We can celebrate, a year later, that we accomplished and documented (on our blog and in a special issue of ZooKeys) four of our five goals. We’ll let your readers decide which of our goals we failed to realize.

Three field books by Junius Henderson. Photograph by Guarav Vaidya, (c) 2012.

What is your background and how did you become involved? What is your role on the project?

As is the case with any epic adventure, the journey starts modestly only to balloon into a vast army of protagonists sharing a common goal. The Henderson Field Note Project team includes an army of five.

Rob Guralnick and Andrea Thomer are principally to blame for the Henderson Project. They identified Henderson’s field books as an opportunity to move the conversation about digitization forward. In doing so, they added Gaurav Vaidya to their corps for his Wikipedia-oriented expertise and to seek solutions that could bring both sets of Henderson data into a useful format.

Because an epic adventure would be incomplete without some co-opted innocent bystanders, Rob, Andrea, and Gaurav captured David Bloom and Laura Russell; David for his interest in citizen science and uncanny ability to herd cats, and Laura for her unparalleled expertise with Darwin Core and abilities to solve the problems that other programmers stumble upon when seeking Wikipedia-oriented solutions.

What were some of the challenges you encountered?

Field book of Junius Henderson, from Bouder, CO, July 1905. Photograph by Guarav Vaidya, (c) 2012.

1. Crowdsourcing: How were we going to communicate with and excite a group of people who we couldn’t be certain even existed to visit our wiki pages and help us by becoming virtual participants and edit transcriptions, tag elements in the text, and generally keep our project from taking years and years to complete? One big solution was our blog. Fortunately, our army of five includes no wallflowers, so we already had a following as a result of other projects, including multiple social media accounts. We put out calls for volunteers and posted some fairly detailed instructions for participation on the blog. The result was fantastic. We had lots of people jump in to help — most of whom chose to remain anonymous on Wikisource (and no, not knowing the identities of the majority of our volunteers was never considered to be a liability or a challenge).

2. Wikisource vs. other platforms: We had a lot of options before us and we could have used any number of them to meet our goals. We knew that any tool or tools we selected needed to allow us to make Henderson’s notes easily discoverable, publicly accessible, freely reusable, and preserved sustainably so we could extract taxonomic occurrences from them. After plenty of research and tinkering, by Gaurav in particular, we settled on Wikisource as our primary tool. We believe that Wikisource provided the best combination of ease of use, open access, an existing community of developers and users, and a set of existing templates from which we could launch our efforts (read more in our Zookeys paper). We realized that Wikisource was not perfect, but it was about all that we could have hoped for given that we had no idea where we were headed at the start. Despite the imperfection, Wikisource continues to be a great foundation for discussion and discovery. We still have many new questions about Wikisource, as well as all other aspects of the project, which is, of course, just about the best set of results for which we could have asked.

Screen shot of Wikisource interface, showing the transcription and tags on left and scan of page on right. Image courtesy of the Henderson Field Notes Project.

3. Moving Taxonomic Records From Text to Spreadsheet: It is no trifle to take a written observation of a taxon from a field book, extract it and its associated metadata from the page, insert it into a spreadsheet that is organized to meet a global standard of biodiversity data exchange, such as Darwin Core, in an efficient and accurate manner. After several long conference calls and some trial and many errors we did find a way to make this happen (see “Data extraction: Seeking efficiency and accuracy”). It may not be the best way to do it, and we’re still toying with other options, but it was effective enough for us to extract taxonomic records, dates, and localities from the first three volumes of Henderson’s field books and publish them as a Darwin Core Archive.

Screen shot of Wikisource interface with an example of data people were asked to tag: taxon, location, and date. Image courtesy of the Henderson Field Notes Project.

3.5. Related to the creation of a Darwin Core Archive with taxonomic records was a self-imposed challenge to link each observation back to the page(s) of the field notes from which it was pulled. The primary reason for this was to provide researchers and enthusiasts alike with the opportunity to read about each observation in context. This effort was influential in the evolution of our understanding of an endeavor such as this; in particular, it was the source of many new questions about why viewing data in context could be important to a line of research — absence versus presence, being one such instance.

4. Name Resolution and Proofing the Darwin Core Data Set: There isn’t a biologist alive today who can’t point to an issue of classification and naming that edges the study of their beloved taxon of choice toward chaos. During the course of our project we were confronted by many issues of idiosyncratic naming protocols, confused synonymies, conflicting naming services, and, in some cases, a lack of proper names altogether. To solve our problems, at least for the project, Laura did a lot of heavy lifting to compare the accuracy of several services, such as ITIS and EOL, and Gaurav followed up by checking each taxonomic reference in our data set that had conflicting options from these services and selected the best match. Finally, Rob reviewed several of the volumes manually for errors in formatting, labeling, and annotations created by our volunteer corps. All the while Andrea and Dave sat around drinking mint juleps and discussing the merits of georeferencing all of the records in the data set (sadly, we haven’t managed to complete that part of our project...yet). Again, we wrote about this in detail in our paper.

Henderson field notes. Photograph by Guarav Vaidya, (c) 2012.

How do you envision the results of the project being used?

We do have aspirations to continue the project and to see the annotation of all fourteen books completed and the taxonomic records extracted into a single Darwin Core Archive, complete with georeferences and other data quality improvements. If we learned one thing from this project, it is that it takes just as much energy to rally the volunteers and keep them working as it does for us to find the time in our own schedules to keep a steady stream of transcriptions and scans available with which they can keep themselves amused.

Are there other projects you’d like to see happen, or like to be involved in, that involve improving access to the content of field books?

It is our nature to want to be involved with everything that everyone is doing all the time with every set of field notes at every institution ever. If we could, we’d love to be the founding staff at the National Archives of Biodiversity Writing, Illustration, Events, Ramblings, and Discovery (NABWIERD) and to have the opportunity to work with field books from far and wide every day. We’d have the best marketing campaign. EVER!

In the meantime, we’re very happy to continue to find ways to use the Henderson Project to expand our personal knowledge as well as that of the larger (often interdisciplinary) community interested in digitization, archives, and museum collections. We are always interested in a challenge, and we remain willing to help anyone who asks. That is, after all, the role of an epic army of digital adventurers, such as ours. All anyone needs to do is ask.

Friday, 30 November 2012

The Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA), along with the Natural
Museum of Natural History, hosts staff from the Field Book Project (FBP) and sometimes
helps provide reference for unique field book collections. Field books, however,
are not the reference team's only responsibility, and their uniqueness poses
special challenges for us.

The SIA is the institutional archives for the whole of the
Smithsonian. It collects, preserves and makes accessible records that document
the establishment and ongoing work of the institution—19 museums and galleries,
nine research centers, the National Zoo, and administrative offices—you get the
picture. It's the largest archives collection within the Smithsonian and, I
venture to say, one of the best exposed on the web. SIA made a conscious
decision to make its holding’s as accessible as possible to the widest possible
audience. Virtually all unrestricted finding aids (4265) are searchable and
available online. This, as you may guess, is a blessing and a curse.

The volume of requests is high (5000 remote requests last year),
international in scope, and the audience diverse—kids, scholars, research
scientists, genealogists, etc. So, it is not uncommon for a member of the
reference staff—thankfully there are three of us—to hop from researching
objects in an exhibition to locating an architectural structures report from
the 1970s to investigating the donation of a leather pocketbook in the 1920s to
acquiring the skeletal measurements for the elephant in the rotunda of the
Museum of Natural History. This makes the team consummate generalists rather
than experts in the subtle minutia—think Swiss Army rather than sushi knife.

Because SIA finding aids are well done, a good number of the
questions are focused and direct with a fairly clear path to the answer. Field
books, however, pose different challenges and make the FBP shine as a reference
archivist's dream.

Like any reference request, understanding what a patron
hopes/expects us to provide is one thing, and what we actually find is another.
Sometimes this shortfall can be disappointing for the researcher. On the one
hand, this stems from a researcher's unfulfilled expectation of what they think
“should” be there. On the other hand, sometimes the reference staff doesn't
have the time to read the notes deeply, copy hundreds of pages from delicate
notebooks, or possess the expertise to spot the telltale that solves the
mystery.

The FBP staff's careful cataloging, digital scanning of the
notebooks and blogging make these hard-to-find treasures available to
researchers anywhere in the world. They have identified materials in other
parts of the institution, expanding the scope of known resources. They have
established connections between collectors, identifying possible resources for
filling gaps in one field book by looking at a fellow collector's field book
from the same expedition. (For more on this topic check out Tammy Peters’s blog
post on historical context and connections.)

The focus of the FBP staff allows them more time than the
reference team to delve into the details and personalities behind the notebooks
and uncover interesting tidbits—cocktail recipes, poetry and sketches (both
visual and textual), brow raising stories of collectors—that really bring these
records to life. Bottom line, they could dish some dirt in the 1920s.

In all, the FBP promises a virtual archive that researchers can
access from their desks anywhere in the world and that makes this reference
archivist very happy.

Friday, 23 November 2012

Field books are the lifeblood of a natural history collection. It's hard to conceive
of a museum without its field notes, but that's exactly what I found when I
arrived at the Condon Fossil Collection of the University
of Oregon (UO) Museum of
Natural and Cultural History (MNCH) in 2007: close to 100 years of
collections without original field notes. Digging into the problem revealed
that the notebooks weren't gone (a relief) but had just followed collectors
when they left the museum.

Our
fossil collection traces its history back to the pioneer geologist Thomas Condon,
who began collecting in the area that is now John Day National Monument in the
1860s. Condon amassed almost 6000 specimens, with the majority of his
collections from the John Day and Fossil Lake fossil mammal faunas. Upon
Condon’s death in 1907, UO acquired his collection, forming the basis of the
current MNCH, and in 1918 hired Earl Packard to succeed him.

Packard
had Condon's notebooks transcribed into a new printed catalog, which has been
passed down to me through a series of mimeographs and photocopies of
mimeographs. While I haven't yet seen Condon's original notebooks, I do have a
good record of the provenance of Condon's fossils. I am still hopeful of
finding Condon's original notebooks, and as time allows, I plan to visit the UO
archives and other appropriate archives in the state.

Earl
Packard’s field notes are a more difficult problem, but we seem to have found a
solution. Packard oversaw the Condon Collection through the 1930s, when all
natural science research at Oregon public universities (including the Condon
Collection) was moved to Oregon State
University (OSU) in Corvallis. Shortly after Packard retired in 1950, the Condon Collection returned to UO,
but Packard's notes have remained in Corvallis, where
they are a part of the OSU archives. Elizabeth Orr, our still very active
emeritus collections manager, has been instrumental in hunting down Packard’s
missing records. While we don't yet have a complete set of Packard's notes, it
is reassuring to know they exist and are protected at the OSU archives.

After
Packard retired, the Condon Collection was incorporated into the UO Museum of
Natural History under paleontologist J. Arnold Shotwell. Shotwell was a
tremendous collector, amassing tens of thousands of specimens over his more
than 20 years at UO. Unfortunately, a 1972 disagreement with the UO
administration over budget tightening measures lead to Shotwell’s angry
departure from the UO; he carried all his field notes with him. In the 2000s,
Ted Fremd, then Head Paleontologist at the John Day National Monument,
approached Shotwell, and the two developed a friendship. Over the following few
years, Shotwell shared many of his notes with Fremd, who in turn has shared
copies with us, allowing us to finally fully document Shotwell’s critical
paleoecological collections. Unfortunately, Arnold Shotwell died in early 2012,
but before he died the paleontologists at UO managed to reconcile with him,
even recognizing him with a MNCH lifetime achievement award. His family has
graciously agreed to pass on to MNCH the remainder of the notes, photographs,
and maps documenting his field collections.

The
UO paleontologists after Shotwell are still with the university, either as
emeritus or active faculty, and have been contributing their field books to the
MNCH archives. For all new collections, we archive digital copies of field
books annually and add their printouts to the museum’s physical archives. I
hope my story gives you a sense of the frustration I have felt tracking down these
notes, knowing that the effort of decades of fieldwork is lost without them. A
sense of scientific duty drives my new dedication to the immediate deposit of
field notes. As ethical collectors, we must ensure that future workers won’t
have to search for our field books; without supporting documentation, the specimens
we collect today may as well be paperweights.

Tuesday, 20 November 2012

Selection from the field book of Tho Tran, who interned with the Department of Vertebrate Zoology, Division of Mammal. 2012.

This summer, the National Museum of National History (NMNH) selected 25 local teen interns from underrepresented STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) populations to take part in the YES! (Youth Engagement Through Science) program. Throughout the summer portion of this program, each of the interns was paired with a scientist mentor at NMNH, Smithsonian National Zoological Park, or Smithsonian Gardens. The YES! intern projects ranged from tasks as varied as assisting the Department of Paleobiology with prep for isotope analysis to working as a zookeeper aide for Asia Trail. One of the common threads through all of the internships was that students documented their daily experiences and project research in field books. This day-to-day note taking would assist them by helping to develop their observation and scientific note taking skills and providing a vital record for the end of their summer when their work culminated in a poster showcase for Smithsonian staff at the NMNH Director’s Hall.

The YES! interns first delved into the world of field books by learning from the examples of Smithsonian scientists, both past and present. They worked together to identify key aspects of what should be included in daily notes by comparing sample field books from different departments in the museum and visiting the National Museum of Natural History Main Library to explore historic field books from the Department of Botany. Armed with this basic knowledge, and new personal field books, they first took to the public floor of NMNH to test their observation and note taking skills by using the museum as the "field".

Zeidy Cardoso’s notes from the “Using the Museum as the Field” activity. 2012.

Portion of a daily entry by Abram Shaw, who interned as a keeper aide at the Small Mammal house at the National Zoo. 2012

After the YES! interns had built and demonstrated a baseline of practical and historical knowledge about field books, their scientist mentors took the lesson to the next level by sharing their personal field books and helping the interns to tailor their note taking to the students’ individual projects. Throughout the summer, their progress was tracked by weekly field book check-ins, making sure the students were recording data and experiences to the best of their abilities.

At the end of the summer portion of the program, the interns turned in their field books for review and shared their thoughts on the process. I was thrilled by both the openness and honesty in their writing, and the effort many of the students had made to record their experiences in their entirety. Those who committed themselves to the experience gained a newfound respect for the importance of field books in science.

Notes and sketches from the field book of Jennifer Cruzl, who interned in the Department of Botany. 2012.

YES! interns were asked to anonymously provide feedback at the end of the program. The comments below from two participants illustrate just how important the students' field books became over the summer:

"It was a good use of my time during my internship, because I could reflect on my work and experience everyday. I was also able to write down any idea that came to me."

"I liked my field notebook because it has made me feel official and professional. It helped me keep things organized and updated. In addition, I recorded my ideas for future experiments and projects."

Every YES! intern adopted their own personal style for recording their experiences. From the botany intern that selected a specimen daily to describe in further detail because it had “caught their eye,” to the Insect Zoo intern that recorded not only the behavior of the invertebrates he was caring for, but also those of the museum visitors. Students approached the design of their field books differently, some structuring their field notes for systematic entries, others using more of a diary format. It was intriguing to see how students took their training and remodeled what they had learned to fit their individual project, providing a unique window into the work that encompassed all their summer experiences.

This week as part of Beyond the Field Book Project section of our blog, we continue our series of interviews to learn more about who uses field books and for what kinds of research. Last month, I had the opportunity to interview Victor G. Springer, PhD, from the Division of Fishes. His interests are in the classification, distribution, and morphology (particularly osteology; gill-arch musculature) of fishes, with special interests in blennioid and a few other groups of fishes. He has been in his chosen field for over sixty years, and joined the Division of Fishes at National Museum of Natural History in 1961. Dr. Springer was kind enough share some of his process for recording field data and use of field books in his research.

What types of information do you find important to record in your field notes?

I record field data on water resistant paper sheets. I include specific locality data, ecological notes, date and method of collection, initial preservative, and sundry notes (e.g., indications if specimens were photographed), sometimes sight records of species not collected, date of collection, as well as other participants, if any, during the collecting. I also keep a daily diary at the end of day, with various other types of information, including sundry observations and quotidian remarks – sometimes very personal. When the fish are being packed for shipment, an ad hoc list of identifications may be included on the field data sheets or entered in the diary.

What role do the field notes you take play in your research processes?

The field data are now usually completely entered in the Division of Fishes catalog of specimens and on a label placed in the jar with the specimens. This data has been computerized for several years, but for my early collections the data was only recorded by hand in catalog books and might not have been completely included. For these early collections I go back to the field data sheets for missing information or to correct errors that might have been made when data were entered by hand in the catalog books.

Do you ever consult field notes that were done for another expedition, for example a historic expedition? If so, how do you use the information in those notes for your research?

When using specimens from the George Vanderbilt collections at Stanford University, jars of specimens only had the field collection number associated with them, and it was necessary to go to the detailed field data sheets to get the information. This has happened at the National Museum of Natural History only on rare occasion, but there is one outstanding example I remember. An ichthyologist named William Longley, made important collections during the early 1900s in various places in Indonesia and also in Florida. He never associated labels with his specimens, relying on his memory and field data sheets for the information he needed. When he died, his collections of mixed fish from mixed localities were given to us. These were sorted by us and generally identified – usually only to family, and whoever did this placed the same locality label in each jar of specimens: EAST INDIES. Using his diaries and field notes I was able to assign more accurate localities to those specimens of his that I used in my studies.

Thank you, Dr. Springer, for sharing with us about your work process and the use and value of field notes relating to your research. You can learn more about ichthyology field notes on our Blog.

Friday, 14 September 2012

As part of the Beyond the Field Book Project section of this blog, we have been talking with Smithsonian scientists to learn about the significance of field books in their own research. I recently spoke with Dr. Storrs Olson, a paleornithologist based at the Smithsonian Institution whose research has focused on studying extinct birds, mainly on islands including those in the South Atlantic, the West Indies, Hawai’i and Bermuda. In addition to creating his own field books as part of that research, Dr. Olson also frequently consults field books in archives for historic accounts of research conducted in those same areas. He shared the following story about one field book in particular:

One of the most exciting things that I discovered was going back through a field journal, or a diary, of Andrew Bloxam who was on an official British government expedition in 1825-26. I got into this because he’d been to Hawai’i so I wanted to see what significance his Hawaiian field notes might have. He collected a fair number of birds for that time, which was very early in Hawaiian ornithology. That expedition also went to a few other places, such as Mauke in the Cook Islands. I had printed a copy of Bloxam’s journal from the microfilm in the British Museum archives, and was reading it one night in England and came across a passage about collecting on Mauke in the Cook Islands. He mentioned a bird that he had shot that day and gave an exact description of it. I recognized this right off and said to myself, ‘That’s the mysterious starling!’

The “mysterious starling” was the more or less informal English name given to a specimen at the British Museum that was considered mysterious by virtue of the fact that no one knew where it had come from. It was thought possibly to be from the Pacific but the details on who had collected it, and when and precisely where, had been lost over time. This was a particularly significant specimen, too, as it was the only specimen of that species, now extinct, in existence.

Dr. Olson told me that he couldn’t wait to get back to the museum the next morning to compare the description in the field book with the specimen itself. And then of course it turned out to be a perfect match. “Without those field notes, we would have never known. So that was a real breakthrough.”

Reflecting on the significance of such a discovery made me wonder what other kinds of long lost information has been rediscovered in field books. Do you have a story about making an exciting discovery in a field book? Let us know in the comments.

You can learn more about the mysterious starling and other birds from the Cook Islands in:

Olson, Storrs L. (1986): An early account of some birds from Mauke, Cook Islands, and the origin of the "mysterious starling" Aplonis mavornata Buller. Notornis 33(4): 197–208. PDF fulltext

Friday, 10 August 2012

As part of our Beyond The Field Book Project section of this blog, we are initiating a series of interviews to learn more about who uses field books and for what kinds of research. The other week I had the privilege of interviewing Kay Behrensmeyer, PhD, in the Department of Paleobiology. She is a contributing author to “Field Notes on Science & Nature” and keeps meticulous field notes herself. She shared some great information on the role of field notes in her own research, which focuses on Paleoecology and Taphonomy. Taphonomy is the study of how fossils and organic remains are preserved. According to Dr. Behrensmeyer, “Taphonomy [has to do with] the transition from the biosphere to the lithosphere. The fossil record is a tiny sample of life in the past so a lot of my career has been devoted to figuring out what that little sample means in terms of the original animals, plants, and ecosystems. Field notes link the fossils and the age and the lithology and the ancient environments. And everything kind of comes together around that primary data.”

What role do the notes you take in the field play in figuring that out and how would you use that in a lab or how would you describe that process?

Being in the field is a wonderful experience that I love [but] it is a small percentage of my total research time. I learned that you can get distracted and not remember a lot of what’s going on when you do field work. So I began taking really careful notes.

One example I’m [working] with now are Pila snails, known today as “Apple Snails.” The opercula, or “trap doors” of these snails are mineralized in life and relatively easy to fossilize. We collected many of them as in the ancient strata of Pakistan, even though we never see the whole shell. There are bands on the opercula of Pila that could indicate a seasonal climate, so we need to know exactly where they came from. My field books provide that information.

In your piece in Canfield’s publication, it really stood out how important the visual materials – the photographs and the sketches—were to your work.

I’m very visual as a thinker—so if I can connect back with an image like this one of the bone beds, or the strata or even the people […] then I can really get my head back into that space.

Dr. Behrensmeyer's notes and polaroid documentation of a bone bed near the Kenyapithicus Site, November 24, 1987.

I usually worked with an old style Polaroid camera that took black and white because the black and white survives better, archivally. The colors in Polaroid film just didn’t last very well. We used a color polaroid in Kenya, and if you scan them right away then you can archive them, but in the notebooks the prints fade.

And Pakistan--we can’t go back any more, of course, because of the politics. It’s doubly important there to have the diagrams and the Polaroids.

How would you use that information when you come back from the field?

For drawing the stratigraphic sections, the layers, into diagrams. You need to have all the information you can to reconstruct those layers and the strata when you’re back in the lab, and to filter the information about the fossils as well. It’s a tried and true axiom that you need good field observations to do this type of research.

For example, here’s a date and these are the sample numbers. And the tiny writing to fit in as much information as possible on the page. This is a description of the rock type. Its tuff, which is a volcanic ash. This is very important for recording the name of that particular volcanic layer. There’s a rich fossil deposit here and it’s sandwiched between two very nice radiometric dates. It’s very important to document the age as well as the layers that this bone bed was in. We called this the Kenyapithecus site. This is an important early relative in human lineage. In the publication, there’s a much simplified version.

I do a lot of transferring of information from my primary field notes. And they’re always what I go back to if there’s a question.

Do you ever consult field notes that were done for another expedition, for example a historic expedition?

I also worked in the Jurassic Period early in my career. The bone searchers of that time, Marsh and Cope, were out looking for dinosaurs. We used their early records, especially maps, sketch maps, and books. All of that can be a real treasure trove of important information.

Do you find that those historic field books are generally easy to locate?

If it’s a well-known museum, you just ask them if you can visit and look at the field books. Or some of them are reproduced digitally now, although generally you have to go to the museum where the scientist worked. Field notebooks before the 1960’s are not available unless you go to the archives. It would be wonderful if they were more accessible.

So if these were made available online, how would you want to be able to search for them?

Definitely if there are maps, sketches, diagrams, I would want to see those. The place, latitude / longitude – some kind of GIS referencing system. Those are particularly valuable. I had an intern last summer who went to the field notes of the people who collected with Teddy Roosevelt in Africa, and there are catalogs of all the specimens they collected in 1911. It was a real problem figuring out what a place name, then, was now. And there were two identical names for rivers that were in opposite ends of Kenya.

Also any reference to fossils and, of course, the dates. The people that were involved; the institutions; where the camps were. Maybe weather. In a way, it’s a record of what climate was like then, too. In Wyoming, they got snowed-in in May or October, they were pushing the limit because they were on a treasure hunt and they were trying to get the dinosaurs out, according to some of the books you read about those early expeditions. There may not be heavy snow in May anymore. That’s more on the end of the human side of it. That’s also really valuable.

Is there anything else that you would like to add about the use of field books or the value of field books in your research?

They’re a really important part of our legacy and our research. They’re essential.

Thank you, Dr. Behrensmeyer, for sharing your insights on some of the valuable information that we can find recorded in paleontological field notes. Please join us next month for another installation in our interview series when we talk with Curator Emeritus, Storrs Olson, from the Division of Birds.

Friday, 27 July 2012

My research explores the effects of climate and land use change on Mount Desert Island, Maine. I’m a graduate student in Biology at Boston University and my field work aims to re-survey the abundance, distribution, and flowering times of plants. When I am studying long-term changes in plant communities, I often wish that I could time travel. What did the island look like a century ago? What plants grew there? How abundant were they? And did they bloom later than they do now?

To answer these questions, I turn to field notes from the late 19th century. For over a decade, dedicated fieldwork was undertaken to catalogue the island’s flora, create an herbarium of specimens, and publish a book on the subject. However, these notes were not penned by professional scientists, or even graduate students — the entire project was the work of college kids on summer vacation. In 1880, a handful of Harvard boys sailed to Mount Desert Island and camped on Somes Sound. They hoped to study the natural history of the island — botany, geology, meteorology and ornithology — and dubbed themselves the “Champlain Society” after the 17th century French explorer who named the island.

In 1880, Acadia National Park would not exist for another three decades, and Bar Harbor’s reputation as a summering place for the East Coast elite was in its infancy. The Champlain Society allowed Harvard gentlemen a chance to get out of Cambridge and into the wild. Samuel A. Eliot, one of the Society’s members, remembered the origin of their plan:

Why not select some particular region and put in the summer studying its geological formations, its flora and fauna, its birds and fishes, its trees and shrubs? There would be a happy combination of work and play; sea and land; tramping, sailing, and reading.

It didn’t hurt that Samuel’s father was the president of Harvard, with a yacht available for the sail, and a cache of camping supplies held at the head of Somes Sound.

For a decade, the Champlain Society returned to the island each summer. While the ornithology and meteorology studies eventually lost out to the luster of society ladies, hops in hotel ballrooms, and moonlit boat rides, one determined young man, Edward L. Rand, cleaved to the botanical mission. Throughout his undergraduate years, the summers while he was a law student, and then while a practicing lawyer, he always came back to his annual fieldwork. The Flora of Mount Desert Island (1894) stands as a testament to his dedication. Rand co-wrote the book with John H. Redfield, an accomplished botanist and retired businessman who summered on the island. Other botanists also contributed to the Flora; Rand reported on their efforts in the Champlain Society’s Camp Logs. Today, paging through the Flora, I can use their work to analyze changes in the plant communities here. Rand and Redfield described the abundance of each species they found on the island, and these notes provide a baseline for my comparisons. Species that were once common have become rare; one-fifth of the species that were recorded here in the 19th century have since disappeared from the landscape.

To understand the methods behind the Flora, I looked at the Champlain Society’s Camp Logs. These journals record the daily activities of the Society during their early Mount Desert Island summers, often infusing them with schoolboy humor: “Monday, July 21st 1884 — Rand went on a botanical expedition to Cedar Mt. Swamp, finding a great many specimens of black flies.” Through the Camp Logs, I was able to time travel to an earlier island, peek into the canvas tents that once peppered a field along the now forested sound, and peer over Edward L. Rand’s shoulder as he pressed botanical specimens in the evening and added annotations to his growing species list.

Monday, 30 April 2012

Every great institution is built upon a bedrock foundation of timeless values that shape its culture and identity. The Smithsonian has always embraced a passion for learning. We are fortunate to have had a founder, James Smithson, and many other early champions who were deeply committed to acquiring knowledge through research. Mr. Smithson was a scientist of the Enlightenment period who chose to work in the new field of chemistry. One of his other passions was mineralogy—not only discovering new minerals but determining practical uses for them. Mr. Smithson prided himself on the work he did in the field to identify minerals. His work was highly regarded by his peers, and at a young age he was elected to the prestigious Royal Society of London. It was such a notable distinction that only one American of the time was so honored—Benjamin Franklin. After Smithson’s death, one of his mineral discoveries, zinc carbonate, was dubbed “smithsonite” in honor of his lasting contributions to the discipline.

The Smithsonian’s first secretary, Joseph Henry, a prominent scientist and engineer himself, continued the legacy of scholarly research. The subsequent secretaries in the Smithsonian’s formative years shared similar science and engineering backgrounds and reinforced the ethic of research and scholarship initiated by James Smithson and Joseph Henry. For 166 years, research has remained one of the Smithsonian’s core values essential to the Institution in all areas: science, art, history and culture. Its importance is permanently enshrined in the zinc statueColumbia Protecting Science and Industry. The statue is being cleaned now instead of standing at its usual spot atop the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries building, but it still symbolizes the important contributions of the sciences and arts and pays tribute to the benefactor who made it all possible.

Tragically, most of Mr. Smithson’s comprehensive mineralogical field journals were lost in a fire after they had been transferred to the Smithsonian, but now, as then, field books are critical to what we do. They reflect the work of hundreds of Smithsonian scientists and scholars who have conducted comprehensive research at sites all over the world. Simply stated, detailed research requires going to the source, no matter the availability of resources online or through technology. You cannot understand the “why” of a botanical species if you do not know the “what” of its ecological setting. You cannot explain how a civilization created a Deer Stone monument in Mongolia if you do not visit the region where it was made. And you cannot understand how the Inka could possibly build a remarkable civilization in less than 200 years, only to see it disappear, except by doing the field research needed to understand the world of that time.

Smithsonian field books document the evidence-gathering phase of research. They capture the thoughts of scientists and scholars as they formulate hypotheses that will subsequently be tested by other scientists and scholars. They form the basis for conclusions, publications and educational materials that derive from the work of individuals. Collectively they represent the Smithsonian's institutional memory of thousands of expeditions and investigations.

Secretary Clough visiting field site at Machu Picchu, Peru (2011).

I was fortunate to have served as a faculty member at some of the most respected research universities in our country, and one of my joys was working on exciting research with my 34 PhD students. Field work has always been a particularly satisfying endeavor for me and was an important component in the investigations I undertook on landslides and earthquakes, here in this country and around the world. As Secretary of today's sprawling Smithsonian, my own research interests have necessarily taken a back seat to the needs of the Institution at large, but I still have the opportunity to live vicariously through the work of my talented Smithsonian colleagues. From time to time I have ventured back into to the field to see their work in action in places like Peru, Chile, and Kenya. Observing these talented experts in their element truly brings their impressive and important research to life. In each case I have documented these excursions with travel journals so I can share the remarkable efforts of our scientists and scholars. They are available for people to see at the Smithsonian Magazine website. It is important for everyone to see us in action and understand how Smithsonian research is making a difference, not just in Washington DC, but all over the nation and throughout the world.

Secretary Clough visiting field site at Bighorn Basin, Wyoming. (2010)

My travel journals are the closest thing to a field book I do today. Writing these journals requires extensive preparation and delving into the subject matter before I arrive at a site. Fully understanding the location puts the research into context and enables a deeper understanding, both for me and for readers of the journal. When I visit sites like the Bighorn Basin in Wyoming, as I did with NaturalHistory scientist Scott Wing, the effort pays off. While there, Scott arranged for me to crack open a shale fragment exposing a fossil from 55 million years ago that documents a time when the earth was much hotter than it is today. By applying the results of field work about this epoch, we can unravel the mystery of modern climate change and better understand the causes of rising temperatures and its potential effects on the planet. Scott’s field books document 15 years of remarkable discoveries he and his colleagues made in the Big Basin. These detailed logs explain what triggered a massive release of carbon and methane into the atmosphere. His field books are invaluable research tools that will continue to serve as foundations upon which other scientists can build, sparking new insights into our planet’s climate.

Like our collections, field books are treasures of knowledge and information, but they also serve to document in real time how the scientific method is used to unlock the mysteries of our world. Previously, field journals have only been accessible to a select few. Now, thanks to my talented colleagues who have begun digitizing our field books, we can share these valuable resources with everyone. The Smithsonian is undergoing a renaissance, utilizing the modern tools of technology to fortify our traditional strength of scholarly research—and enhance the learning for everyone. It is an exciting new day for this venerable Institution.

I began my professional work – exploring women’s historical relationship to scientific practice – through a quirk of geography; I grew up in the same town as Almira Lincoln Phelps, the famous nineteenth-century botanist, and have spent the last decade chasing her across time and space in order to sate my curiosity. What circumstances had permitted her to become a scientist? Who had taught and encouraged her? At first, Phelps seemed an anomaly. Yet, in tracing Phelps’s teachers and students, I discovered a widespread culture of American women engaged with science. By the time I opened Sarah McGrath’s herbarium at the Filson Historical Society in Kentucky, I knew I wanted to write about the various ways women practiced science between 1720 and 1860. So I have sneezed my way through many volumes of dried plants hoping to reconstruct botanical pedagogy at female academies via a close reading of these documents.

McGrath created her herbarium while attending Science Hill Female Academy, a female boarding school located in Shelbyville, Kentucky. Julia A. Hieronymus Tevis founded the academy in 1825; it became a feeder institution for Wellesley College by the early twentieth century. As may be gleaned from its name, Science Hill offered a cutting-edge program in the natural sciences, which successfully produced hundreds of scientifically-literate graduates before 1860. Typically, coursework consisted of chemistry, botany, and natural philosophy, but Tevis also offered specialized training in rotating topics that complemented scientific lectures held at local universities and lyceums. In the 1840s and 1850s, these topics ranged from ornithology to galvanism.

It is difficult to reconstruct the classroom experience in the absence of explicit commentary, but McGrath’s May 1834 herbarium reveals much about how botany was taught at Science Hill. Field work was encouraged: McGrath collected thirty three specimens of both cultivated and wild plants, all but two of which were identified by class, order, genus and species.

The recorded classes and orders indicate that McGrath identified her plants using the older, Linnaean taxonomic hierarchies. In contrast to the newer natural system, which structured botanical taxonomy around genetic relationships, the artificial Linnaean system grouped plants by the number of pistils or stamens a flower possessed.It was not uncommon for girls to learn the artificial system before the natural system; Almira Phelps believed the relative simplicity of Linnaean taxonomy made botany more accessible to female students. In lecture, McGrath would have learned plants’ reproductive systems so she could determine class and order by counting plant parts, then would have used a descriptive index to identify the plant’s binomial name, given as Genus species. These indexes required fluency in botanical Latin, a bastardized form of classical Latin invented to create a universal terminology for describing plants.To identify Baptisia tinctoria (Wild Indigo), for example, McGrath needed to pick out the following description from all the others listed in class Diandria, order Monogynia by comparing them to her dried specimen:

These technical terms would have been explained in class, but if McGrath forgot their meanings, she could check definitions in her text book, which was carried afield with her. The specific language of the Baptisia tinctoria description indicates that McGrath probably used an early edition of Amos Eaton’s Manual of Botany or Almira Phelps’s Familiar Lectures on Botany to identify her plants.

In addition to taxonomy, students were taught how to preserve their specimens. Once collected, plants were stored between sheets of absorbent paper as they dried; drying time depended on the thickness and moistness of the plant. Flowers were opened to expose pistils and stamens before being pressed, such that descriptive identification could be verified by the dried specimen. McGrath used a simple mounting method: she cut slits in her album’s pages to form loops that would hold each plant’s stem in place. Blossoms were ephemeral, so seeking specific specimens required time to search and foreknowledge of a plant’s preferred environment. Plants needed to be pressed within a small window of time to prevent withering, or uprooted and carried home in a wet bladder or sphagnum moss.

To summarize: collecting, identifying and preserving specimens could be incredibly time consuming. Creating even a small volume of plants required both dedication and training. My plea as a historian would be this: do not dismiss women’s herbaria as decorative albums of pressed plants or mere hobby. They are, in fact, concrete evidence of women’s long-standing interest and skill in botany.

The author would like to thank the Filson Historical Society for the use of their images.

Wednesday, 25 January 2012

As a twelve-year-old in southern Indiana, I fell in love with plants while riding my bike all over Brown and Monroe Counties, collecting tree leaves for an 8th grade science project. A boy could do that then and not be viewed as odd in the least. The cornfields appeared to extend to the horizon the minute I pedaled past the Bloomington town line, and limestone quarries and family cemeteries were as common as trolley cars in my original hometown of Baltimore. Stopping to carefully collect and press the leaves of trees about which I knew nothing–osage orange, mulberry, buckeye, catalpa and Kentucky coffeetree–my innate curiosity was raised the way exercise increases endorphin levels. There is, unfortunately, no evidence of these precious childhood memories, nothing to show my children and soon-to-be first grandchild.

Prior to my first professional collecting trip in 1976, as a field assistant in Brazil for the world renowned bamboo specialist, Tom Soderstrom, I was advised by F. Raymond Fosberg, another eminent 20th century Smithsonian botanist, to take careful notes and record my observations. He was adamant. I didn’t. Sure, the collections survive in the United States National Herbarium as testament to the ten weeks we spent collecting bamboo in Bahia, an excursion that resulted in many new species and two new genera. And, sure, it wasn’t technically my responsibility to take notes. But not having embraced the opportunity to record the impressions of a 22 year-old neophyte during what was a pivotal moment in my career has become one of my greatest regrets.

Maybe these subconscious shadows inspired the creation of the Field Book Project. But these two stories have been actively haunting me since reading Michael Canfield’s history and “how-to” of scientific note-taking, Field Notes on Science & Nature (Harvard University Press). What Mike and his contributing authors have accomplished is to thoughtfully merge the clinical with the emotional, to value precision and passion side-by-side, and to provide each reader with that sense of awe, curiosity and wonder that I recall from childhood. However, they also make clear that there is a responsibility on the part of the traveler to not only collect, measure, and describe but to interpret, imagine and communicate ideas forward. The importance of this last point is well conveyed by contributing author Kay Behrensmeyer, a Smithsonian paleobiologist, in her chapter entitled Linking Researchers Across Generations. “You may have no idea about the future significance of these experiences when they are happening, and it is far better to assume that they will be of interest to someone in the future ….” Why is it that, while we value the writing of past field workers, we don’t think that our notes and musings will be considered important in the future? If you can get over that, the next time you find yourself caught up in the inspired beauty of a walk through the woods, you’ll pick up a pen (permanent ink, please) or pencil and start writing (on good paper, of course).

However, the manner by which we record information is changing. Piotr Nasrecki, a colleague of Canfield’s at Harvard and the developer of software to aid field work, describes the efficiencies of electronic data capture in the field in his chapter Note-taking for Pencilophobes–I’m certain that last is not a word. Is this development an improvement over hand-written notes? Nasrecki thinks so. Certainly there is improved data consistency and time efficiency to be realized. But contributor Jim Reveal, my botany teacher at the University of Maryland, worries that a computer-based field book “lacks anything personal about the writer (and doesn’t encourage or accommodate other notes …).” But I suspect, as with anything else, a smart field worker will incorporate both options.

Beyond the chapter content that describes experiences in the field, beyond the sometimes tedious explanations of how notes should be taken, beyond the intriguing inclusion of contributors’ actual field book pages (with diagrams, sketches, photos, maps, and personal notes), and beyond attempts to answer such broadly stated questions as “Why Keep a Field Notebook?” (Erick Greene), “What is the value of these journals?” (Roger Kitching), “Why Sketch?” (Jenny Keller), and “What is the Field?” (Michael Canfield), the most compelling pieces to these contributions are reminiscences of childhood. For it is here that, like me, so many careers began in curious wonderment of the natural world.

Two statements jumped out at me as witness to the dedicated efforts in which Field Book Project staff members are engaged–one from a mentor, the other from a hero. Again from Jim Reveal, “… the fate of original field books often is less certain … all naturalists should recognize that such books are vital records capable of providing significant information to future researchers.”. I couldn’t have paid him for a clearer expression of concern for these one-of-a-kind objects. And from the Forward by E.O. Wilson, one of my Dad’s and my personal heroes for all that he has meant to our appreciation of nature, “If there is a heaven, and I am allowed entrance … I will carry with me an inexhaustible supply of notebooks, from which I can send back reports to the more sedentary spirits (mostly molecular and cell biologists).” Ha!

When I read Mike Canfield’s blog contribution on this blog last May, about the gift his great grandfather created for posterity, I finally understood The Field Book Project. As scientists we get all academical–I’m sure that’s not a word either– in mining these objects of history for the data, descriptions, and scholarly content found between their covers. But their legacy is more than that. Field books are personal. They are, regardless of the age of the scribe, simply a reflection of the time spent roaming the world in search of those feelings we first experienced as youngsters. And, in the absence of my notes from Indiana and Brazil, the Field Book Project is my gift to my children, their children, and their children ….

Monday, 19 December 2011

By Alice Tangerini, Scientific Illustrator, National Museum of Natural History

On December 16, 2004 I received an email from James White, Curator of Art for the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, asking if I had received a query from a consignor selling two drawings by Walpole on EBay. Frederick Andrew Walpole was a staff botanical artist for the US National Herbarium, precedent to our current Department of Botany, National Museum of Natural History. Walpole was employed as an illustrator from 1896-1904, and during that time, he made many drawings on government sponsored field trips with staff botanists, notably Frederick Coville and Joseph Nelson Rose. Many of Walpole’s works reside at the Hunt Institute on an indefinite loan from the Department of Botany and are catalogued there. About 10% of the collection is still here at the Botany Department and is catalogued (with the exception of missing drawings and paintings) using information from Walpole’s field notebooks.

James was scrupulous about the records of artists in the Hunt Institute and followed the activities of sales on EBay searching for art that fell within the collections. James was aware that botanical illustrations were often sold on EBay, and knew from previous instances that some of these could be the missing artworks from the National Herbarium collections. When he saw the Walpole drawings for sale on Ebay he notified me and forwarded this message on December 16, 2004 from the consignor:

“We thought you or someone you know might be interested in this eBay auction of botanical drawings by Frederick A. Walpole. Please note that this auction ends 18 Dec 2004 at 15:08:23 PST.”

I asked my Chairman if there was a precedent for purchasing artworks with federal or trust funds. I also conferred with Smithsonian attorneys and others to determine whether we had a right to reclaim Smithsonian collections that have been lost for a number of years and are just surfacing through public sales. Unfortunately, the drawings were sold before we could determine an appropriate strategy.

Then on January 12, 2005, James emailed me about another auction of Walpole drawings. Dates for the botanical sketches were included in the sales descriptions. They were posted by the same consignor as before. Jim tried to tie information from notes by a botanist who had researched Walpole’s work to the drawings on EBay, but without having a publication it was too difficult. This time, after internal consultations, we concluded that the Smithsonian might not have sufficient proof that the drawings were actually made on government time it would be difficult to prove they were our property. So again on January 14, 2005 Warpoledrawings were sold on EBay.

On February 14, 2005, however, another sale of two Walpole drawings with a tracing was announced by the same consignor (again). Specific details of dates and collection areas where the plants were drawn were included in the items’ descriptions. With this information I was able to go to Walpole’s field notebooks and find the individual entries for each of the drawings, which were made on official field collecting trips for the Smithsonian. They were three illustrations in graphite of two species of Pinus and two species of Abies made in 1898 and 1902. Walpole drew these in the field as studies for drawings to be executed in ink. I photocopied the item entries from Walpole’s field note books and faxed these along with an emailed request to Smithsonian attorneys [General Counsel] asking them to intervene for the Department of Botany and request return of the illustrations. The following request was sent to the consignor:

"The Smithsonian has received an e-mail from you informing us of the sales of two Walpole drawings on E-Bay by your company. According to our records, those drawings appear to be from the national collections and were not deaccessioned, sold, or otherwise transferred from our collections. Can you please provide us with information regarding the circumstances under which you acquired them? Would you be willing to withdraw them from sale while we determine whether these are, in fact, Smithsonian property?"

The consignor asked for faxes of the catalog information for the drawings and when he received the faxed pages of the field notebooks he informed the Smithsonian that he would return the drawings to us as follows:

"We have passed on the information regarding the Walpole drawings to our client. He has asked us to send the drawings back to you. Please let us know the appropriate department and to whose attention they should be sent."

The Walpole drawings of Pinus and Abies were returned and the consignor was thanked for his grateful return of the artwork.

﻿Recovery of these three Walpole drawings would have been difficult or impossible without the information captured in Walpole’s field notes. The documentation provided in these notes not only serves as natural science data, but in this case, served as a means to track the provenance of other materials related to the same collecting event.

Wednesday, 24 August 2011

What would it be like to wander North America before (or shortly after) the arrival of European explorers and settlers? What did the landscape look like? Who were the people already living here and how did they interact with their world? These questions have occupied the time of a variety of thinkers and writers ranging from Aldo Leopold to more recently Charles Mann in his book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. And yet other writers have wondered about our wonderings about past landscapes.

Imagining past landscapes is especially difficult in the Upper Midwest where plow agriculture dominates. The remnants of past landscapes are small and have been heavily changed over the past 150 years, and a landscape without roads and farms built on the grid of the Public Land Survey seems unimaginable. The 1836-1839 expedition notebooks of Joseph. N. Nicollet give us glimpse of the unimaginable, and perhaps this is why Nicollet and his work have been a subject of fervent interest over the past 100 years.

Nicollet was a French scientist, formally trained as an astronomer, and he travelled extensively in the Midwest as he worked to collect the data need for his Hydrographical Map (Figure 1). His story has been wonderfully recounted by Martha Bray in her book The Journals of Joseph N. Nicollet. Bray and her husband also published several collections of excerpts from the Nicollet which have probably done more than anything else to maintain and generate interest in the expeditions and the landscape of Minnesota and the Dakotas. It was these excerpts that got me interested in Nicollet more than 25 years ago while still a student.

Because excerpts are excerpts and cannot give a full sense of a work, I, two colleagues, and many students at St. Olaf (with funding from NCUR and the Lancy Foundation) have been working to make available the complete field notebooks and maps and other records generated by the Nicollet expeditions, with particular focus on the years 1838 and 1839 when Nicollet travelled through the prairies of southern Minnesota and the eastern Dakotas (Figure 2, Figure 3). The materials we worked with are archived in Washington DC at a variety of locations. The 1838 journal of Nicollet and many of his map, astronomical journals , and even a mail pouch are housed at the Library of Congress in the Manuscripts Division. Notebooks for the 1839 expedition up the Missouri River and on to Devil’s Lake, North Dakota are at the National Archives. And finally, an 1838 Field Botanical Notebook by the expedition’s botanist Charles Geyer is housed in the Smithsonian’s archives.

Scanned images of all these are posted on a Nicollet Web Site that we created for these materials. We felt quite privileged to be able to work with these materials. One of the things that gave us a real sense of the writers and their work were – as silly as it seems – the imperfections such as stains and ink spots and tears. We have used a compression program called Zoomify to allow the reader to greatly magnify most of the material at the web site for this reason. Nicollet’s notebooks are full of sketches and observations of temperatures and sky conditions most of which were not/could not be included in the published excerpts. And it was these sketches that allowed us to relocate a number of the places visited by the expedition, for example the “pretty little hills” just west of the Makato (Blue Earth) river in southern Minnesota (Figure 4).

Absent also from the published excerpts were extensive descriptions of plants and their habitats that Geyer recorded. It was reading these notes that gave us a better understanding of how important Geyer’s observations (written in English) were to our understanding of the landscape, and it was in part these notes that led us to begin to search the Smithsonian National Herbarium for specimens collected by Geyer (Figure 5).

Figure 5. Excerpt from Charles Geyer 1838 Botanical Notebook.

Figure 6. Asclepias viridiflora, an example of a plant specimen collected by Charles Geyer. Now a part of the collection at Smithsonian National Herbarium, barcode: 00945841

To our pleasant surprise we found many specimens and this was repeated as we searched through the herbaria of the Philadelphia Academy of Science, New York Botanical Garden and Missouri Botanical Garden. To date we’ve located over 450 specimens and images of many of these specimens are now posted at the web site we have created or available on-line at the aforementioned herbaria. Unfortunately most of the 1838 specimens that Geyer notes in his field notebook were lost in transit from St. Paul to St. Louis, and while the 1839 specimens are wonderful they are not accompanied by a corresponding field notebook. The location of the 1839 field notebook is a mystery. It is likely gone forever, perhaps, if it even survived that long, being destroyed in the firebombing of Dresden since Geyer returned to Germany to live near Dresden and was associated with the herbarium there. If ever relocated this journal would be of tremendous scientific value. We can only hope.

We continue to work with the field notebooks and other materials. For example, a student and I will soon embark on a project to transcribe daily weather data collected by Nicollet that we hope to be able to add to a larger effort to rescue historical weather data. We hope someday to be able to return to Washington to continue scanning materials.

Friday, 29 July 2011

I am a biologist who was born in a desert in Perú. My hometown, Lima, is a city of 10 million on the Pacific coast of South America. The beaches, the waves, and the sunset painting the sky all sorts of red are my soul’s fuel. Naturally, as a young undergraduate biology student I tried to stay as close to the ocean as possible. But, as a college junior I fell in love with other waters…

Physical map of northern and central South America showing the Tropical Andes.

September 20th, 1995I was looking forward to this trip to the Amazon basin since the day I learned about it. We got together at the Museum of Natural History in Lima to depart for this Ichthyology field trip to the Perené River, tributary of the Amazon. Once at the museum we realized that there were nets and buckets for samples occupying most of the space in the jeep. So, after arranging people, buckets, and backpacks everything fit.

September 21st, 1995After a 6-hour drive across the mountains, the feel of traveling like sardines in a can faded away. All those amazing stories of adventures in the Amazon that we heard about in class became reality: we were in the amazing Perené River!

Ichthyology class of 1995 in the Perené River after getting out of the jeep.

Now what? We were seven undergraduate students, buckets and nets in hand, with little or no idea as to what to do with them. My ichthyology professor approached me with a pencil and a bunch of forms, and showed me how to fill in the Field Book and off he went giving instructions and different tasks to each student. I did the best I could at the speed at which the group was moving collecting fish. Our first collecting station was a little creek that drained into the Perené River. We didn’t have a GPS so the field notes had to be as precise as possible, and a figure of the general area would illustrate the collection site so it could be found in the future. We collected two specimens of the cutest little catfishes in that creek, but only in that creek.

Field Notes for station HO9502-01. Hand writing of Norma J. Salcedo and Hernán Ortega. Drawing by Hernán Ortega. The sampled area is marked with several “x” signs.

July, 2011In September of 1995 I fell in love with fragile and unique ecosystems. I saw streams and rivers that start as little creeks, up high in the mountains, where your eyes can’t reach. I felt cold, clear, fast waters as they make their way into valleys supporting life throughout their way as one of the most incredible and species rich environments of the world: the Tropical Andes.

I went back to the Perené River many times after 1995. In 2003 the creek described for HO9502-01 was dry. The slopes of the Andes are changing. How fast, or why? We are not sure. It makes me sad to think that my students might not get to see the beauty of the waters that one day got my heart.

Hernán Ortega still takes his Ichthyology class to collect fish in Andean rivers, just like he has been doing for about 30 years.

Many biology undergraduate and graduate students support the collection building at the Museo de Historia Natural in Lima (MUSM) by volunteering and conducting research to complete the requirements of their theses.

Val Nolan Jr. (1920-2008) led an extraordinary life. As a self-taught scientist he was unrelenting in his drive to pursue bird research despite the many paths his life would take.

Val was born in Evansville, Indiana, where both his grandfathers served as mayor. He later moved to Indianapolis, where his father was appointed U.S. Attorney. Fostered by one of his teachers, Val developed a strong interest in birds during his senior year at Shortridge High School. After high school, Val attended Indiana University, where he chose to major in history. After graduating in 1941 he served as Deputy U.S. Marshall, and then in the U.S. Secret Service as a bodyguard to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He joined the U.S. Navy in 1944 and became a language specialist in Japanese and served in Intelligence in the Pacific under James Roosevelt, the president’s son.

After World War II ended Val had hoped to turn his focus on bird biology. However, a professor in this field discouraged him from this path so Val decided to pursue Law instead. After graduating first in his class from Indiana University School of Law (now the Mauer School of Law), he joined the faculty and became a highly respected and influential teacher, serving twice as Acting Dean.”.

Val’s enduring interest in birds ultimately led him to pursue biological research on his own accord. Between 1952 and 1965, while working as a Professor of Law, Val conducted extensive fieldwork on the prairie warbler (a migratory songbird) in Bloomington, Indiana. He was extremely dedicated to his goal of studying this single species in detail, learning as much about its life history and behavior as he possibly could. His work resulted in the publication of a monograph, the Ecology and behavior of the prairie warbler Dendroica discolor (595 pages), for which in 1986 he received the American Ornithologists' Union’s Brewster Award (for the most meritorious work on birds of western hemisphere in the last ten years).

Bound volumes of Val's "Prairie Warbler Notes" Indiana

In 1957-1958, Val received a Guggenheim Fellowship for two projects (one legal and one biological). He became a research scholar in Zoology and ultimately Professor of both Biology and Law from 1966-1985 at Indiana University, continuing work as professor emeritus 1985-2008. In Biology he trained 22 Ph.D. students and authored more than 100 scientific papers.

His many years of research on the prairie warbler generated nineteen bound volumes of field notes(approximately 200 to 350 pages per volume). He was meticulous, highly organized in his note taking, and had the foresight to have the notes typed and bound so that others could easily read and make use of his data.

The notes contain not only a rich documentation of prairie warbler behavior during the breeding season, but also include general observations about natural history. For example, his notes include details of daily weather, the timing of the emergence of leaves and flowers of plant species in the spring, as well as observations of a variety of animal species including arrival dates and behavior of bird species during spring migration.

Val’s volumes of field notes on the prairie warbler were digitized by the Indiana University Digital Library group and mounted alongside the work of other university-affiliated scholars into IUScholarWorks, Indiana University’s online repository . Because his notes were typed, the digitized versions could be processed using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) making the text searchable and thus allowing a reader to find particular words or phrases throughout the volumes.

His notes are not only a rich source of information, they also document the research process, how systematic fieldwork on a single species can be conducted and translated into a body of scientific discovery. The original (paper) copies of his notes are privately owned and, therefore, were not readily discoverable or accessible by others. Making them available through the IUScholarWorks digital repository ensures that they are available to the entire scientific community and beyond so others, like Val Nolan, can pursue their own driving interests in nature and learn more about the natural world and the processes of biodiversity research.

About the authors:

Eric Snajdr worked for many years as a research associate with Val Nolan Jr. and Dr. Ellen D. Ketterson before becoming a science librarian. Dr. Ellen D. Ketterson was Val Nolan Jr.’s wife and research partner.

Wednesday, 15 June 2011

Inside Cover and First Page of William F. Foshag's Kaminaljuyu -Jade. The cover has jade samples taped to it and the first page in the notebook has notes on the minerals, c. 1949. Smithsonian Institution Archives, Acc. 91-144, Box 1, Folder: Field Notebooks (Re: Jade); Negative Number: SIA2011-0943.

Ever since I started working at the Smithsonian Institution Archives, I have encountered many field notebooks. Often tasked with researching an expedition or Smithsonian employee, the notebooks provide an endless amount of information to digest. The awesome thing about notebooks is the variety and surprises that lay in store; you never really know what you will find underneath the cover.

About a year ago, my research threw me into the papers of William Foshag. A mineralogist and geologist, Foshag worked as a curator for the National Museum of Natural History’s Department of Mineral Sciences. Foshag was best known for his scientific studies of the newly formed Mexican volcano Paricutin. His papers are filled with sketches of cones, lava deposits, measurements of the growth of the volcano and examination of the minerals from the surrounding areas. While working through the collections I saw many of these wonderful notations, but then I stumbled across a folder of three notebooks that did not contain the same materials. To my amazement, I found minerals taped to the pages along with rubbings of carvings. Intrigued by the find, I put my other research to the side to uncover why these samples were in Foshag’s papers.

It turns out that Foshag conducted an extensive survey of jade in Central America. Inspired by the Mesoamerican archaeology he saw in Mexico, Foshag wanted to search for the unknown source of jade in the New World. With the aid of a farmer, Foshag discovered a vast deposit of jade along the Metagua fault in Guatemala. He took samples and conducted research using X-ray diffraction patterns and refractive indices to categorize the Guatemalan jade as jadeitite, finding it to be similar to jade found in Burma. The jade was found in serpentine groupings (a group of common rock forming minerals) in the ground, and in his article “Chalchihuitl--A study in jade” in 1956, Foshag speculated that additional specimens would be found where the serpentine was in Central America. Foshag also took rubbings of the jade carvings and placed those in his notebooks, meticulously explaining the make-up of the type of jade used to create them.

Not only did Foshag collect the materials for scientific classification, he also carefully examined the history of the Aztecs, Mayans and Olmecs, to understand how the jade was used. This research helped him to classify the minerals by color and compound to distinguish what may have been used for medicinal purposes, tributes and tools. Foshag’s findings were the definitive works on Meso-American jade and were published in his "Mineralogical Studies on Guatemala Jade," in 1957.

This is the exciting thing about field notebooks. Inside each book are stories to be told, drawings to be seen and even the occasional specimens to find. They not only tell you what was found, but capture the methodology of the author and often his or her personal thoughts on the subject they are studying. To steal a line from a famous movie, field notebooks are like a box of chocolate -- you never know what you are going to get.

Monday, 06 June 2011

The Missouri Botanical Garden has identified the digitization and online public display of the Engelmann Herbarium of plant specimens and related field literature as a priority collection stewardship activity. The approximately 8,000 specimens gathered during pioneering expeditions into the American West following those of Lewis and Clark are the first scientific record of the plants growing in the vast wilderness west of the Mississippi River. As such, they form the earliest verifiable documentation of species occurrences before the rapid migration west permanently altered that pristine landscape through human alterations and the introduction of invasive species. These specimens provide an historic complement to the 3.6 million specimens already databased and accessible through Tropicos, MBG’s botanical information system. Field books created by researchers collecting during the time of Engelmann’s own research are often cited in specimen records contained within Tropicos and can help provide a connection between the specimen and its associated literature.

This project is structured to accomplish three primary goals:

Scanned specimen of Heuchera sanguinea Engelm.

Goal 1:Provide web-based search and query access to the Engelmann Herbarium via Tropicos. The 8,000 historic specimens in the Engelmann Herbarium documenting America’s westward expansion were databased and barcoded by Herbarium Assistants, making their scientific data available for query and analysis through Tropicos. Approximately 900 type specimens within the Engelmann Herbarium were scanned and published alongside their transcribed scientific data.

Goal 2:Digitize field literature and published reports associated with collecting expeditions in the American West. MBG Library staff selected roughly 100 volumes of botanical literature generated from these expeditions as well as related material for digitization. Using well-established procedures and existing equipment, Imaging Technicians scanned the selected reports and references, and published them using existing workflow via the Botanicus web site at www.botanicus.org. Tropicos has been updated to include links to the Botanicus materials, enabling a cross reference between historic museum collections and the public domain literature describing the artifacts within taxonomic publications.

Public domain literature

Original and annotated notes describing collections

Goal 3: Provide web interfaces for geospatial analysis and data modeling into the Engelmann Herbarium and Tropicos. New geospatial software developed by academic institutions and commercial software companies such as ESRI provide enhanced query interfaces into these historic collections. As part of this project, these components were integrated into the core Tropicos system, enabling rich map-based visualization and analysis. Because of the diligent notetaking by the researchers who traveled into the West to collect specimens for Engelmann’s herbarium (both through their field notes and specimen labels), users can now benefit from the developments in mapping technology to visually see where these specimens were collected. Furthermore, users can also track the paths of these expeditions on a map by accessing the associated data tied to each specimen.

The specimens from Engelmann’s herbarium are not only scientifically significant but also speak to America’s history and culture. They hark back to a time in the nation’s youth before a coast-to-coast transportation infrastructure, high-rise buildings, and even before a civil war – a time in which the landscape of the West was relatively untouched by the effects of the Industrial Revolution. Thanks to the hard work of MBG’s herbarium, library, and bioinformatics staff, specimens from George Engelmann’s herbarium and the related literature are now digitally preserved and available online for use by all including researchers, students, and the general public.

Wednesday, 25 May 2011

Not every botanist becomes famous. Claude Canfield never lodged botanical specimens in the Smithsonian or any other herbarium. He never held an academic position and didn’t publish any scientific papers. To be honest, he never really became a true botanist. His only scientific claim to fame is that he was my great grandfather, which, admittedly, isn’t really such a claim. However, Claude’s botanical studies and his documentation of them are incredibly valuable to me as I make sense of how I came to study nature, and provide a personal example of the true value of field notes.

I have to believe that Claude’s interest in natural history had something to do with the fact that his son Bailey, my grandfather, set up his family on a wooded gentleman’s farm in southwestern Michigan. And I’m certain that my experiences on that farm affected my desire to become a naturalist and scientist, as we spent many long vacations and holidays there, hiking and exploring among the sassafras and sumac, and watching satyr butterflies wafting through its wetlands.

I never met my great granddad Claude, but he wrote some notes in 1891 that have helped me understand where I came from as a naturalist. These notes came in the form of a small “Botany Notebook” that my grandfather gave me on Christmas Day in 1998. This botany notebook is full of observations on shapes of leaves and contains many sketches that are presented as labeled figures. Granted, these notes are not revolutionary science, but instead are documents that help me understand my family and the tradition of natural history we have.

Direct descendents are only one group of ancestors from which we might derive inspiration, and there is a much larger set of academic antecedents who inform our work. They too have written us volumes of notes and letters -- not necessarily individually addressed, but more generally directed to us -- in their field notebooks. I know I’m not alone in counting Edward O. Wilson as one of my personal heroes. I can even trace my academic lineage back to him as a sort of great uncle. I recently had the chance to look into his notebooks from his historic trip to the Caribbean in the 1950s and was transported to the field with him, looking over his shoulder as he laid down primary observations of ant behavior. Since, I have worked to bring a set of perspectives on field notes from other eminent naturalists – such as Bernd Heinrich, Kenn Kaufman, and the Smithsonian’s own Anna K. Behrensmeyer – into print as Field Notes on Science and Nature (Harvard University Press) in the hopes that this may allow all of us to consider how we keep notes and to be inspired by other field scientists.

Field Notes on Science and Nature is only a sampling of field notes and perspectives on how they may be kept. There are shelves and shelves of unexplored notebooks from historical figures in field science that are only now being revealed to us more generally by the Field Book Project. These documents provide countless examples of adventures, trials, and actual scientific data that have been sent to us through time in the form of field notes. Thankfully, we will now be able to sort through these and better understand our museum collections, add new information to the stories we tell about the plants and animals we study, and also consider why we head to the field and who we are in the context of our naturalist ancestors.

Museum Victoria’s Field Guide is an easy to download, easy to use, application for the iPhone, iTouch, and iPad that allows users to explore over 700 animal species of Victoria, Australia.Developed as an open source application, Museum Victoria plans to release the code in June to encourage others to develop the application for use on other devices like the Android.

As someone who knows very little about Australian wildlife, I didn’t even try to use the Field Guide search box when I tested it out this weekend.Instead, I allowed myself to be guided by the colorful images in the browse “Animal by Group” section, or by funny and unfamiliar animal names.Each animal has at least one image, a page that provides details about that animal, a map highlighting their areas of distribution, a page on their scarcity, and audio if available.

The Field Guide app and the field books I catalog are on many levels at different ends of the spectrum.For example, their use of technology is very different.Furthermore, field books are primary source documents whereas the Field Guide is a carefully compiled database.Yet, there is an obvious relationship between something like the Field Guide app and field books.Without field books, this application wouldn’t exist.Field books are one of the building blocks for these amazing tools that allow scientists, museums, and educators to aggregate data about nature into an easy to use database.

Similar to the Leafsnap app being developed by Columbia University, University of Maryland, and the Smithsonian Institution, the Field Guide app allows everyday people and nature enthusiasts to become more engaged with the natural world.I challenge our readers (or the children of our readers) to go one step further:create a field guide of your own with about 5 animals in your area.Since the Field Guide app focuses of animals in Victoria, you could use the app as a guide to find similar animals living in your community.Alternatively, check out these tips from the National Wildlife Federation for creating a field guide.Please share your findings with me by adding a comment to this article below. I’m looking forward to hearing from you on what you find in your area!

Part of the project involves the digitization of field notebooks and natural history collections and the generation of metadata for these items. Six of the seven institutions will conduct pilot projects of varying scope and size. We will then develop the means to link these collections to one another and to published material in the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The results of these projects will be made available for harvesting, reuse, and repurposing without cost, and third-party web applications developed to best serve diverse user communities. The final deliverables will include an enhanced community Smithsonian Field Book Registry, as well as workflow and procedures so that other institutions may contribute to this project.

The California Academy of Sciences pilot project includes digitizing the field notes and a portion of the finch specimens from a 1905-1906 expedition to the Galapagos Islands. In 1905, eleven men, including seven scientists, sailed for the Galapagos Islands on a schooner christened the Academy.

Crew members included:

Rollo H. Beck, Ornithologist, chief of the expedition and captain of the Academy

Washington H. Ochsner, Geologist and conchologist

Francis X. Williams, Entomologist

Edward W. Gifford, Ornithologist

Joseph S. Hunter, Ornithologist and mammalogist

Alban Stewart, Botanist

Joseph R. Slevin, Herpetologist

While in the Galapagos Islands for 366 days a large scale disaster struck San Francisco – the great 1906 earthquake and fire. Over 80% of the city was destroyed and over 3,000 people lost their lives. Most of the holdings of the California Academy of Sciences were lost to the fire. The collections brought back from this expedition became the new beginnings of the Academy’s collection.

Intern Josh Roselle scanning field notes in the Project Lab

Among the specimens brought back in 1906 were over 5,500 finches. Colloquially known as “Darwin Finches,” these are the same types of birds associated with Charles Darwin and the beginnings of the theory of evolution and are of interest to scientists, historians, students and the public alike. Our Galapagos finches are one of the most requested in the research collection but are very fragile, being over 105 years old! By digitizing these specimens it is hoped that they will be more widely available to audiences who might not otherwise get the chance to study them. Our digitized finch specimens will be linked to the fieldnotes we are scanning, connecting the written document to the actual specimens that were collection during this expedition. You can read more about Galapagos Finches (Geospiza)at the Encyclopedia of Life.

One of the most exciting aspects of this digitization project is that a good portion of our work is done in the Project Lab on the public floor of the California Academy of Sciences. Museum visitors are able to watch us as we scan field notes and take pictures of finch specimens, as well as observe a PowerPoint that explains our project. Library Intern Josh Roselle has clocked many hours in the Project Lab scanning field notes and has been a great help in bring the hidden collection of field notes to the attention of a wider audience.

The Field Book Project is an initiative to increase accessibility to field book content that documents natural history. Through ongoing partnerships within and beyond the Smithsonian Institution, the Project is making field books easier to find and available in a digital format for current research, as well as inspiring new ways of utilizing these rich information resources.